exchristian

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Welcome to the exchristian community! We strive to provide a safe space for anyone looking to leave the religion or seek comfort while dealing with the fallout from leaving. This site was originally hosted on reddit before the ~~Great~~ Minor Exodus of 2023.

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it's not enough to "prove" god is real (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by wellsley051@lemmy.world to c/exchristian@lemmy.one

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I was thinking about this issue this morning. Christians think they they have compelling evidence that their religion is true, and they just need to convince us nonbelievers of this evidence and then we'll start going to church (plus whatever else they expect/want). However, providing actual evidence that their god is real isn't enough, and I don't think they grasp that. Let's say that Christians are able to provide actual good evidence in this area: I would start believing their god is real, but I wouldn't repent or start worshipping him because their god is a genocidal monster.

In the end, it doesn't matter if their god is real, because we'd all be under duress to worship him just to avoid an eternity of torture. It's garbage. I'd rather suffer for eternity than worship a god like theirs. But they only think about the first hand of the problem, and many of them deny that their god is malevolent.

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[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

A great deal of mental effort is required to work around the whole problem of the OT God being malevolent, pathologically jealous, controlling, sociopathic, manipulative, and generally abusive.

It all makes sense when you look at the religion from a detached viewpoint in the context of its history. The religion was used as a political tool to unify a bunch of bronze age polytheists. For that to work God had to be jealous of other gods (of the time) while also being the only real god, and he had to be the type to dish out death and destruction if the nation "cheated on him" with another god. Hence, many of the stories are about encouraging (with rewards) or threatening (with death and other horrors) Israelites, as a nation, to only worship the official god of this official state religion.

Clearly this approach (as well as peer pressure and other mechanisms) work very well or this religion would not still be around.