He's a Christardian

I'm not one to circle jerk on this shitty topic, but I'm bored. He's an opinion.

I'm Christian and believe in God. You may think I'm an idiot, but each to their own. I never bother arguing for my religion and I ever force my views upon people. In fact, hardly anyone I know, family or other even know about my beliefs. Here's my only argument and nobody can ever beat me.

Can you prove to me that God doesn't exist? The only response to that question is, can you believe he does exist? My reply is always the same. No, I can't, but I'm willing to take a chance he does, because certain things in my life that have happened have led to believe there is a God.

Other points,

I'm willing to listen to theories on multiverses, the 4th dimension and others.

I've read the Bible cover to cover.

Matthew 26:52 refers to a specific episode in which Jesus forbids his followers - the followers then and there, not globally - from resisting the people coming to arrest him. It has no application beyond that.

Not that it matters what Jesus said. Europe has been Christian for 800 years, and the French/Mediterranean part for 1500, and it hasn't stopped a single war. The teachings of Jesus were ineffective in stopping judicial torture, pogroms, the mass murder of civilians, war rape, and the constant violation of the peasantry. It must either be accepted that either Christ's teachings a wholly ineffective in bettering the behavior of man or that the overwhelming majority of self-confessed Christians weren't really Christians, in which case professing to be Christian means nothing.

Now, I know what you're going to say: all of those people weren't true Christians™, despite the fact that Europe has been the center of the Christian world for a millenium. Those people clearly know nothing about Christianity, unlike you, Steve, historically illiterate Protestant from the 21st century who decided 3 years ago and this Jesus-guy was rad and who's been spouting memes from CARM ever since.

Good, as long as you're not pushy about it, I don't give a fuck what you believe. However, I dislike organized religion because it has political clout that it does not deserve, so what you would say to the idea that religious institutions somehow facilitate an acceptable culture in society, and therefore they deserve to exist on that merit alone?
You hold the burden of proof if you believe that some being exists in the cosmos and is responsible for all that we know. You admit that you can't prove his existence but you're willing to invest yourself in what amounts to a blind devotion. Fine, as long as you realize that it's patently absurd to expect others to accept your reliance on personal anecdotes and the "magic of belief" as measurable and concrete evidence that can reasonably prove a deity's existence or even a rational decision making process.
We do not know what happened, there are speculations, but we don't have any more evidence to suggest that there was existence before the big bang than creationists do that can confirm the existence of God.

You conflate the universe having a creator with the Bible being divinely inspired.

I'm going to grant, for the sake of argument, that the universe was created by a sentient, even person-like being. It doesn't follow in any way that the Bible - a collection of books assembled in the 4th century, centuries after the source material, which was a collection of legends to begin with, was written - contains any true statements about this being, much less that it was somehow "dictated" by him so as to be 100% true.

There's three steps here:
1. The universe had a person-like creator (granted as a premise).
2. Certain human books contain true statements about that creator.
3. That creator guaranteed those books to be 100% error-free.

You will never make any progress from 1 to 2,3, nor can you possibly do so.

Well, maybe you experienced legit miracles. I can't know. I do have my own experience to share, though:

It says in Mark 11:22-24 (also Matthew 18, John 14):

The husband of a woman I knew was diagnosed with cancer. I prayed for his recovery and survival every day for weeks, but he died. This invalidates a very specific claim Jesus made about the power of prayer.

This is a consistent experience people make: prayer is promised to move mountains, yet we have no instance of the laws of physics being violated in a clearly visible way as a result of it. When people claim healing as a result of prayer, there either (a) was medical intervention, (b) the story can't be verified, (c) it turns out there was no healing at all, or (d) the condition was one which was known to get better on its own. There are no cases of lost limbs being restored. Why? Are amputees evil people? Do they not have Christian friends and family who'll pray for them?

Or what about people praying for safety in war? Has any marauding army ever been smashed by meteors from the sky before it could reach some city and rape and murder to its heart's content? No. I guarantee people prayed for that to happen, though.

"I felt God's presence" and such are paper-thin rationalizations. You didn't feel God's presence; not really. He never audibly talked to you, he never did obvious miracles, he never visibly appeared. All anyone is ever left with is either nothing whatsoever or some vague emotional experience that he attributes to the Holy Spirit. If there were a real, human-like God visibly interfering in human affairs, we'd know it and there's be no doubt whatsoever. It'd be like DnD, with prophecies, divine spellcasting, angels, healing… the whole 9 yards. Instead, we have people talking to themselves about muh daily bread every morning, and nothing happens.

No you haven't. If you had, you would realize that it is even written in the 10 commandments that "thou shall not kill". Guess what? Wars involve lots of killing. The government are the ones who order it. Neither God or Jesus orders people to kill. So you can lie to yourself all you want, blame "religion" for these wars. Instead of looking at the source of the problem, that the rich & powerful are the ones ordering the war, controlling our government, slaughtering innocent lives, mainly targeting poor countries like Afghanistan. Hell our government killed lots of innocent Indians who lived in this land. Scientists are the ones inventing weapons. Government brainwashes people into thinking war is good. In reality it's just another way to control us. Real Christians follow the actual scripture & don't participate in these wars because of one commandment that says "thou shall not kill". The fact that even Jesus tells his followers not to kill, shows that he's a pacifist.

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"Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; have mercy on me and hear my prayer." Book of psalms

I guess it's a lottery? In no way is it telling you that God will answer you. But I'm sure he hears them.

And then there's James 1:7

"That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord."

I don't expect every single one of my prayers to be answered. That would be stupid.

So you think I've never heard one of the most widely known phrases in the world? The Quran has a far more emphatic commandment (5:32):

And yet all of Islam's borders are bloody and Muslims in Iraq and Syria are butchering entire villages, and taking the women as rape-slaves.

Apart from that, you don't even know standard Christian apologetics. Whenever you mention the 6th Commandment to a Christian who is for the death penalty or some particular war, he'll invariably say that it should be translated as "you shall not murder", meaning unlawful killing. In practice, this justifies any and all killing because you can just define the killing you want to do as not being murder.

Jesus perhaps not, but I hope you're not serious about Jahweh not ordering killing. He personally murders every firstborn child in Egypt in Exodus 11:4-6:

He orders the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and male child of the Midianites, while dragging the female children into sexual slavery (Numbers 31:17-18):

He commands the same to be done to the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15:2-3:

The violence in the OT was a major point of friction in the early church, with Marcion proposing the Gnostic idea that Jesus hadn't been sent the OT's god at all but by a merciful, higher god. Marcion was the first to compile a Gospel, by the way, and canonical Matthew was written largely in response to him. This is how major a problem the OT violence was for early Christians.

cont.

The Native Americans were some of the least "innocent" people on this planet, renowned for their savagery. They scalped people, raped, butchered. The early settlers lived in constant fear of the wilderness, as raiding parties could emerge at any moment. If anything, the ones living in what is now the Western USA were worse. One tribe whose name escapes me worshipped a sort of cannibal demon and they were so hated by their neighbors that they begged the White settlers to kill them all. Disney's Pocahontas isn't actually real history. But that's just an aside.

Including the historical, explicitly Christian governments? The French got together and butchered the Albigensians and Cathars at Béziers, and they did so under the leadership of the Catholic Church. The 30 Years' War was fought for explicitly Christian reasons on both side (Protestantism vs. Catholicism) and the violence reached such proportions that entire swathes of Germany were depopulated. The Crusaders ransacked Christian Constantinople during the 4th Crusade (I'm not counting the other Crusades against you because those were good and fuck the Muslims). Again: were all those people, despite Christianity being the center of their lives and having lived in a fervently Christian time and place, not "real" Christians?

It is explicitly telling that God will answer me. Jesus himself tell me so in Mark 11:22:

Any why hasn't a single prayer for the regrowing of an amputated limb been answered? If not: what kinds of prayers does God answer?

Do people pray for legs to be regrown? I'd love to hear it/read it.

You're the one espousing a claim. Lol. You seriously think you don't have the burden of proof?

m8, is your argument literally "nobody's ever prayed for the return of a lost limb"? And that God would make it happen if people just asked for it? How many people have lost limbs through the centuries? Are you seriously saying that not one of them asked God to heal him?

And why don't they ask? What do they have to lose?

And let's not forget my case:

Jesus claimed that we could pray and receive what we asked for (and this was certainly a "good" wish). I prayed. I didn't get what I asked for. Case closed. It ain't real.

I've prayed before and I've got what I've asked for, I'm willing to bet there are many like me. Just like there are many like you. What can we do? Does God not regrowing limbs definitively prove he doesn't exist? Will it make me question my belief in God?

It proves the unreliability of the Bible, if nothing else.

And might I ask what that was? I've put my cards on the table.

It's not unreliability at all, you're just miss reading the bible. Why would I tell you my prayer? It's personal to me and you'll only try your hardest to refute it, so it's pointless.

Yes, well, I only read Jesus's clear and unambiguous words, but apparently I should've read whatever Bible you have in your home.

I will remind you again of Jesus's own words:
Mark 11:22

What's there not to understand? He literally says "whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours". How much clearer can you get? And if I can't trust Jesus, whom can I trust? You?

I.e. you did not receive divine intervention.

You're missing the point, Jesus isn't talking to youthe reader. It's a story and in the story he's talking to one of his apostles. Peter I think. After Jesus died they were also given the power to perform miracles etc.

Prove it.

You've got to be shitting me.