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 ====== Primer ======
-Christianity as a whole is hard to pin down, so anything on this page needs to be treated very carefully. Christians come in many shapes and forms:\\
+Because Christians come in many shapes and forms, Christianity as a whole is hard to pin down. For example, some Christians consider certain things sinful, others don't really mind. Some take the Bible literally, others see it as an interpretative piece from a certain timeframe that they think should be cherry-picked because the times have changed (as if slavery was moral then but is immoral now). In fact, what people believe "is Christianity" is interpreted //so// differently by each individual that [[:jehovah_s_witnesses|some]] Christians don't even think they're Christians, they just think they're special.
-Some Christians consider certain things sinful, others don't really mind. Some take the Bible literally, others see it as an interpretative piece from a certain timeframe that they think should be cherry-picked because the times have changed (as if slavery was moral then but is immoral now). In fact, what people believe "is Christianity" is interpreted //so// differently by each individual that [[:jehovah_s_witnesses|some]] Christians don't even think they're Christians, they just think they're special.
 The point is, whatever you say about Christianity, you will probably always find someone who will point out that this actually isn't true and doesn't apply to them. Or they will point out that what you're saying is true, does apply to them, but doesn't apply to //every// Christian denomination. Christianity is very, uh, popular, so Christian denominations spread as colorfully as their beliefs. The variety you will find here is so large that the Christians themselves don't know and actual scientists named an entire field of inquiry after it. Getting an overview of the Christian religion is an undertaking that will take you back to the beginning of larger-scale civilization and is an appropriately epic task.
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 ====== The Bible ======
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+The [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:I_thought_this_was_supposed_to_be_RATIONALWiki|"rational"]] people over at [[:RationalWiki]] have an article on [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bible|Bible]].
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 The overwhelming majority of "Christianity" are traced, in one way or another, back to what is called "The Bible". The bible is a collection of texts written by various writers a few thousand years ago and collected into one book. These texts, according to Christians, lay out the fundamentals of the world: How the world came to be, who's the real ruler of the world, how people ought to act, how people ought not to act and a bunch of stories of things that allegedly happened to a few people, including the saga of one guy in particular who let himself get beat up to make a point. I mean, if I was the child of god then my self-preservation instinct would be reduced too.
 In my interpretation, the bible has basically two sides: One side is a [[:im_14_and_this_is_deep|I'm 14 and this is deep]] story of reality-defying pacifism and forgiveness that makes everyone think they're smart by understanding, but then not actually following through. I've not seen a single person ever actually do as Jesus did and show vulnerability in conflict. The idea is to advertise your humanness and go out of your way to give the person you're in conflict with an obvious opportunity to realize that they're being cruel. From personal experience of trying this exact strategy I can tell with absolute confidence that this strategy is ineffective for 100% of the population, and the vulnerability you're showing will be mercilessly exploited. Not even outside observers are smart enough to recognize this and they'll just call your strategy dumb.\\
-People want what they want, and they'll take the shortest path to get there. If you show your other cheek, you are guaranteed to get that cheek slapped also because that's the shortest path. I mean, an actually laudable sentiment, but very much divorced from reality.
+People want what they want, and they'll take the shortest path to get there. If you show your other cheek, you are guaranteed to get that cheek slapped also because that's the shortest path. I mean, an actually laudable sentiment, but very much divorced from reality. But the much bigger problem is that people's ethical/moral mental development seems to largely end with such one-dimensional stories about love, justice and forgiveness (which they then don't even adhere to). Right and wrong is a lot more complicated and the bible's stories are only a primer into a field of study that is very expansive. Many people, however, think that they've got a good understanding of what is right or wrong just by getting old enough to understand the bible's teachings.
+The other side of the bible is the part that Christians either don't like talking about or have mentally twisted beyond recognition to avoid the confrontation. The bible is riddled with problematic sentiments, teachings, data points and contradictions. It is scientifically inaccurate, ie. factually wrong. [[:rationalwiki|RationalWiki]] has a [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Annotated_Bible|fully annotated bible]] that lets you read the entire goddamn thing meticulously taken apart from a scientific standpoint. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, you can find a more condensed account from RationalWiki at [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_errors|RationalWiki: Biblical scientific errors]] and [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_foreknowledge|RationalWiki: Biblical scientific foreknowledge]]. Hey, RationalWiki even has [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Category:Bible|a full category]] on the bible: "Light iron-age reading". Needless to say, while RationalWiki has many explicitly Christian editors, it isn't particularly popular with the more devout demographic of Christians.
+One thing about the bible is that people really, //really// love derailing conversations because of individual [[:words|words]]. Can we stop bickering about words? Every time you get even a little bit into the weeds with the bible all you're seeing is nobody being able to agree on words because to them these individual little words seem to matter significantly. The constant bickering about how to translate Hebrew is one of the worst things humanity has come up with since the invention of language. And they do this even though anywhere else in the bible these people are 100% capable of dismissing anything they don't like as "allegorical". It's just these select words they need to be //really// picky about because otherwise their whole worldview falls apart.
+And this already leads me to the one thing I think about the bible. The bible is an interpretative, historical piece that is interpreted differently by every single human under the sun. And I'm not talking about subtleties, the differences are so large that many Christian denominations even produce their own translations, which is then published for their members to re-interpret //again//. And then they switch around and around, interpreting individual words or sentences however they feel like it at any given moment. Big numbers exist, but I doubt there are numbers large enough to describe the amount of times that a Christian denomination has changed their interpretation of Bible passages. And all this, even though the bible is not authoritative. It is a book made by man for man, with self-referential stories that offer nothing more than "trust me bro"-stories((Yes I know a person named Jesus was real, and I know there are pieces of cloth.)) and pre-enlightenment level understanding of ethics.
+====== God ======
+Christians believe in the abrahamic god, an entity common to all abrahamic faiths like Christianity. As an agnostic I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of a god, but the problem here is that people are making claims that cannot be verified. God, to them, has a particular identity, with a particular history, things the god did and values the god espouses. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of humans wandering Earth, humans have come up with tens of thousands of different gods to worship, where the Christian god is roughly about as unsubstantiated as all the other ones.
+Even if something measurably divine were to happen, every religion would claim that it was //their// god who did it, and the advantage Christians would have in that debate would be exclusively the number of their adherents, not any actual veracity of their argument. Really, the annoying thing about all of this is that even if the god tried to identify itself, we could never be 100% sure because any god could pretend to be anyone. Or, for that matter, it would probably be very hard to know whether something that happened was divine at all (though I guess with that one I would be open to convincing).
+Now, a god would be free to literally just rewire my brain to make me 100% convinced that god is real, and that would solve a lot of problems. But at this time their excellence seems to be rather unbothered and leaves that work to its subjects. If Christianity just said that "we believe in god, and we worship them" then that would be fine, but Christianity makes a lot of falsifiable claims about the nature of its god, none of which are really substantiated in any particular way.
+Unfortunately I cannot find the scene anymore, but there is a Caleb and Sophia video from Jehovah's Witnesses that essentially tries to make a line of argument that goes like this: Beautiful things exist, therefore god exists. Or, here is a more involved one:
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+I forget where I got this, but I found it interesting. Good for those philosophical types we might run into.
+The Argument from Efficient Causality\\
+We notice that some things cause other things to be (to begin to be, to continue to be, or both). For example, a man playing the piano is causing the music that we hear. If he stops, so does the music.
+Now ask yourself: Are all things caused to exist by other things right now? Suppose they are. That is, suppose there is no Uncaused Being, no God. Then nothing could exist right now. For remember, on the no-God hypothesis, all things need a present cause outside of themselves in order to exist. So right now, all things, including all those things which are causing things to be, need a cause. They can give being, only so long as they are given, being. Everything that exists, therefore, on this hypothesis, stands in need of being caused to exist.
+But caused by what?
+++++ Abridged Content |
+Beyond everything that is, there can only be nothing. But that is absurd: all of reality dependent—but dependent on nothing! The hypothesis that all being, is caused, that there is no Uncaused Being, is absurd. So there must be something uncaused, something on which all things that need an efficient cause of being are dependent.
+Existence is like a gift given from cause to effect. If there is no one who has the gift, the gift cannot be passed down the chain of receivers, however long or short the chain may be. If everyone has to borrow a certain book, but no one actually has it, then no one will ever get it.
+If there is no God who has existence by his own eternal nature, then the gift of existence cannot be passed down the chain of creatures and we can never get it. But we do get it; we exist. Therefore there must exist a God: an Uncaused Being who does not have to receive existence like us—and like every other link in the chain of receivers.
+There must have been a first cause....something or someone had to have always existed.
+++++
+Was this first cause God? Which makes more sense?:
+  - Order, intelligence, and life come from an intelligent, organized living being. e.g.  An intelligent cause, or
+  - Order, intelligence, and life come about by random chances from nothing, therefore without the involvement of intelligence and/or life, e.g. unintelligent cause
+It could only be one or the other. What does your intelligent mind tell you?
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+What does my intelligent mind tell me? Well, my intelligent mind tells me that you should have called it [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity|Argument from Incredulity]] instead. Additionally, it tells me that I don't have sufficient evidence for god's existence and that, even if I agreed that a god must exist, it would not prove that the god in question is indeed Jehovah (as opposed to any other god).
+I'd say that the "things exist, and they can't just come into existence by themselves, so originally ultimately there must have been something that was that was uncaused (god)"((Or Self-Caused)) argument is about as good of an argument **in favor** of god as "an omnipotent god couldn't create a stone that it itself can't lift because of its omnipotence" is as good an argument **against** god. Nice thought experiments, but neither prove anything in a way that could be demonstrated or, ideally, be tested, measured.
+As far as //intelligent design// goes, I will say that this is merely a matter of having or missing the intelligence to find natural explanations for complicated processes. The idea is that god must exist because life as is is way too complicated to have come about randomly. As the character from above is saying, many things in our world are way too orderly to just have happened that way. Well, it is true that many things around us, at least on a large scale, are quite random. Perhaps the better term for that would be "chaotic" instead of random. Weather is a perfect example for something very chaotic but in no way random. The thing is that, on a small scale, many things arrange themselves very orderly and unchaotically indeed. The laws of nature seem to have some kind of order built into them, like for example these hexagon-shaped basalt columns arraging themselves more orderly than any line of human beings ever could. There are mechanical, physical processes going on here that make these columns orderly just by the nature of how things are.
+Now, when it comes to life, life is capable of sustaining itself (that's just the definition of life, really), and this continuity allows life the process of //iteration//. Iteration is crucial to living beings because it has the ability then to evolve beyond hexagons. Random mutation, among other things, causes some living things to be born different, and "fitter" beings have a better chance of being naturally selected. Or in other words, fitter beings have a better chance of reproducing than less fit beings, which means their genes propagate better. At each generation, new variations are introduced, which - if fitter - have a higher chance than others to reproduce. This generational iteration over billions of years is what allowed for the formation of not just single-cellular living beings, multi-cellular living beings and finally living things as complex and well adapted as the human.
+While evolution can explain the development and diversification of life, it does not explain how life came into being in the first place. Unfortunately, the evidence on that front is a lot less substantiated than desirable, but the general consensus at this time is that it is likely that life emerged spontaneously in a process called //abiogenesis//.
-The other side of the bible is the part that Christians either don't like talking about or have mentally twisted beyond recognition to avoid the confrontation. The bible is riddled with problematic sentiments, teachings, data points and contradictions. It is scientifically inaccurate, ie. factually wrong. [[:rationalwiki|RationalWiki]] has a [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Annotated_Bible|fully annotated bible]] that lets you read the entire goddamn thing meticulously taken apart from a scientific standpoint. If you don't feel like reading the whole damn bible, you can find a more condensed account from RationalWiki at [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_errors|RationalWiki: Biblical scientific errors]] and [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_foreknowledge|RationalWiki: Biblical scientific foreknowledge]]. Hey, RationalWiki even has [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bible|a page]] on just the bible itself, complete with a bible category: "Light iron-age reading". Needless to say, while RationalWiki has many explicitly Christian editors, it isn't particularly popular with the more devout demographic of Christians.
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+The [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:I_thought_this_was_supposed_to_be_RATIONALWiki|"rational"]] people over at [[:RationalWiki]] have an article on [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis|Abiogenesis]].
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-====== Perpetuation ======
+Functionally, abiogenesis is beyond me. I wasn't in school for long enough (or didn't pick the right classes) to learn about it. I'm not qualified to explain most of the things I try to explain on this website, but this topic is so deep in the "biomathematics" that even I have enough respect for it to not try at all. If repeated billions of times over billions of years //concurrently//, naturally occurring chemical processes could have produced increasingly complex systems, until self-replication emerges. From there, evolution would do the rest((For further reading on why some people think this is wrong, read [[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hoyle%27s_fallacy|RationalWiki: Tornado in a Junkyard - Hoyle's Fallacy]].)). As I said, I don't fully understand this and, if I am informed correctly, a strong scientific consensus doesn't really exist, but we at least have a potential mechanism by which life could have emerged, which makes it reasonable for me to believe that a supernatural explanation is not necessary.
+The point of all of this: We need not invent gods to explain life. Complex things can arise from less complex things, and we don't need an ultra-complex magic being to create beings of our level of complexity from thin air. In comparison to the complexity of a god, we are still quite basic living beings anyway. There is no reason that god couldn't have made us more complex, more sophisticated. I mean, birds have some very breathtaking, highly adapted and extremely optimized feathers, but that level of complexity/optimization is just a tiny speck in comparison to the sophistication of life that a god could have given us if god had just wanted to. Why instead create life so lowly, deplorable and simple that it's just uncomplex enough to leave the door open for it to be explained away with just a bit of chemistry and evolution? I mean, seriously, they're a god. What's stopping them? Why would a god need to create animals with wings just so that they could fly, they're a god, goddamnit. Why is it always that with anything god supposedly does, god always does it in a way such that natural explanations are better explanations than a god? This has been an ongoing thing for centuries now.