Rest assured I find your gods all equally fictional.
If I don't believe in your cloud fairy, why would I be afraid of your basement troll?
"Religion is not provided to us by revelation. It doesn’t come from the heavens. It doesn’t come from the beyond. It doesn’t come from the divine. It’s man-made, and it shows. It shows very well that religion is created, invented, imposed by a species half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee. It shows, doesn’t it?" -- Christopher Hitchens
According to the Bible, the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
And the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child.
The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother's flank.
Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived.
The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis.
The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan.
Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka.
Horus was born of the virgin Isis.
Mercury was born of the virgin Maia.
Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.
For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence.
There's no end to the way in which this kind of thing can be fabricated, but those who say that you can just tell by the potency and pungency of the story, or the memorability of it, that there must be something true about it, are simply inviting you to rely not on your thinking faculties or your intellectual capacity at all, but on straight out credulity and on the repeated manufacture of things that appear to be part of the hard and soft wiring of legend, in our mammalian primate history.
Apparently if you want to have a prophet, it’s better if his mother is a virgin.
For the Greatest Story Ever Told, it sure is derivative.
Reality Tip: If a story contains any element of magic… or something a LOT like magic… it's fantasy rolled in myth… and that story did not happen for realsies. Maybe some other version of the story… but not the magical version of the story.
And the real version of the story doesn't justify the magical version of the story.
"God,ruler of the universe (billions of galaxies and billions of years old), decided to speak to three prophets in the Middle East within an infinitely small time period (on the evolutionary scale).
Never prior to that and never since.
Seems legit."
-- Gad Saad
"WHY DON'T I BELIEVE IN GOD?
Because God sending himself to impregnate a woman with himself so he could be born, pray to himself and then kill himself in order to sacrifice himself to himself so he can forgive sins he created himself in order to save us from hell created by himself so as to save us from himself, sounds like something even himself wouldn't believe."
Worst. Telenovela. Ever.
"Why is it that every believer decides for themselves what's a metaphor, but when I say that it's all fiction, I'm out of line?"
Or maybe it just feels that way.
Source: twitter.com
"Monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) shows up, what, four or five thousand years ago at the most.
So if you give me my most microscopically small assumption of human existence, for at least 70,000 years, heaven watches as the human species is born, dies, usually of its teeth, usually at about 20, usually its infants having about a 9, 10, 2% chance of living. You can—I don’t have to draw you a picture—watches this with indifference.
Thousands and thousands of generations, miserable, illiterate, starving, hungry. To say nothing of the wars they’ll fight with each other, to say nothing of the cruelties they will inflict as well as the ones they will suffer just from existence.
And only three or four, perhaps five thousand years ago, heaven decides it's enough of that, it’s time for an intervention.
And the best way to do it would be in the most primitive part of the Middle East.
Not in China where people can read and have looked at telescopes. No, in the most primitive part of the Middle East basically by offering human sacrifice to them.
This is a doctrine that cannot be believed by anyone who studied anything scientific, anything historical, anything archaeological, anything paleological, anything biological. No, can’t be believed by anyone.
It can be only be believed by someone who wants to be a play thing and a slave of a pitiless, totalitarian power.
How glad we should be that the evidence for this ghastly entity is nil."
==
Obvious fiction is obvious.
"Back in 1826, a New York court convicted 21 year old Joseph Smith for being a disorderly person and con artist who tricked folks out of their money by claiming to find lost treasures with his magic seer stones…
And, less than a year later, he founded Mormonism by discovering some gold tablets that only he could read with his magic seer stones…
In a hat…"
The new testament seems largely written for contemporary readers. Why didn't God condemn slavery, despite its cultural acceptance at the time? Today, there is near universal antipathy toward the idea of owning another human being. Have we evolved to care more for our fellow man than god? But since He programmed the evolution of thought into mankind, how do we reconcile the contradiction? If it's all about free will, then is God still in the game, or is He not?
The morality of the New Testament being no better than that of contemporaneous humans (such as the slavery, stoning, bride price and genocide), and the wisdom of the New Testament being no better than that of contemporaneous humans (such as the flat, geocentric Earth with a dome over it) becomes much clearer when we recognize that, alpha to omega, the entire contents of the bible, including the god and the savior who appear nowhere else but within its pages, are the fabrications, delusions and lies of the same contemporaneous humans.
Occam's Razor. What's more likely? An existent cosmic being who is capable of making everything, who gives men foreskins then demands they chop them off and doesn't know what a star is, is just that stupid and ignorant, or it's a book of poorly written ignorant nonsense, written by primitive, ignorant people, and of which we have literally no reason to believe a single word?
We reconcile the contradictions the exact same way we reconcile the fact that Bart and Lisa Simpson are still 10 and 8 years old, but have experienced 33 Treehouses of Horror, and Homer is still 38 years old which today means he was born only a handful of years before The Simpsons premiered. Or reconcile who can and can't use Thor's hammer.
It's not that complicated.
Saying things like "programmed the evolution of thought into mankind" is just a roundabout way of saying "I don't understand evolution." Evolution is necessarily, and by definition, undirected. "Programmed evolution" is a like "married bachelor." You don't get to take a contradiction, solve it with an oxymoron, and call the job done. There's nothing more to say here. The question is incoherent. You might as well say "since the triangular circle is square..."
It's trivial that the Old Testament never happened, and since, as the sequel, the New Testament depends upon the events of the Old Testament, and justifies itself by referring to supposed prophecies in the Old Testament - even when they're not prophecies of a human, not prophecies at all, or don't even exist - it's just as trivial that the New Testament never happened at all either. Even more so when you know the background of its origin.
The author of Mark created one Jesus, which was then copied and elaborated on by the authors of Matthew and Luke (both were actually trying to redact/abrogate Mark), while the author of John created a completely different Jesus entirely. They're two entirely different people, doing entirely different things for entirely different reasons.
IF JESUS HAD DIED IN 2000
Paul would be writing his various letters* in the 2020's *the letters that most scholars consider genuine; Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1-2 Corinthians, Romans, Philipians & Philemon - a generation later and having never known Jesus in person
Gospel of Mark won't be written until around the 2030's - with no claims of Jesus' virgin birth, ascension and divinity
Gospel of Matthew won't be written until around the 2040's - with the first record of virgin birth, Bethlehem origin, guards & angel at tomb
Gospel of Luke won't be written until around the 2050's - with the first record of a post-resurrection Jesus eating, appearing & disappearing and ascension to heaven
Gospel of John won't be written until around the 2060's - with the first record of the incarnation of Jesus (god-man), divinity claims of Jesus, the seven "I am" sayings of Jesus and Jesus' lengthy discourse with Pilate
This sure sounds like something that people just made up.
"There weren't any witnesses to Jesus' resurrection. None. At. All.
Despite Jesus foretelling that he would rise on the third day after his death, not one of his disciples showed up to witness it. Not. A. One.
And when the women visited the empty tomb, expecting it to contain a corpse, and reported back to the Eleven Amigos, here's their response:
"But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense." (Luke 24:11)"
-- Robert Conner
None of the characters in the bible actually behave as if any of this is real.
If Beyoncé announced that she was going into a hospital and three days later she'd emerge with a new nose, they would need police and crowd control to manage the fans and paparazzi camped outside to be the first to see it.
Not even Jesus' entourage, who'd been touring around with him seeing all these miracles, knowing the Truth™, and even being told what was going to happen and when, were there waiting for him. And when it did happen and they were told about it afterwards, the reaction wasn't "oh yeah, I remember something about that," it was "lol, nah."
It’s so obviously fiction it’s no wonder they have to coax people into delusion (aka “faith”) to believe it.