Cool. So I'm good then. It's God's fault. Pretty sure Lucifer is all over that one....

Nope. God not choosing you for salvation, does not mean you aren´t held accountable for your sins.

Depends if you’re wearing your seatbelt.

Right. That's my point. If God chooses me, then I'm not held accountable for my sins. I think you are confused, or bad at writing.

And will you ever choose to get your mind outside of kindgergarten, Sunday school, ignorant superstitions about the nature of reality?

The grasp of religion is strong. For Christianity, it is the fear of hell that keeps people believing. Well, at least for a lot of people. I think the most devout Christians are the most fearful that they won't be good enough to make it into heaven.

A lot of things in the Bible don't make sense. Noah's ark, Jesus performing miracles, Jericho falling down, etc... So to an outsider it looks obvious that it is all made up. To an insider, they've likely been indoctrinated since birth. Doubting the existence of God in a Christian harbors guilt/shame/pain. To doubt God is to doubt the very purpose of your existence. Your mind rationalizes how it possibly could be real to avoid the strong discomfort. Also, if you reject God, you also ostracize yourself from the people you know and have that lingering fear of what if hell actually is real and I'm wrong. I could spend forever in hell! Then you relapse back into believing, because you are overwhelmed with that fear.

Another thing that kept me in Christianity for so long, besides hell, was the concept of integrity. With no God a person could potentially overcome their biological/nurtured morality and do wicked things for personal gain while hurting others and possibly live a better life. That simple concept has always bothered me, but sometimes reality isn't the way we'd like it to be. Sometimes bad people can win in life and good people can lose. Karma doesn't appear to exist, but I think a lot of people would prefer if it did. Morality at the very core is subjective and I think that is bothersome, especially if you've grown up with right and wrong neatly set up in a book.

Oddly though, that book contradicts itself often and Christians cherry pick the stuff they like as moral truth and with the bad they say it was only for people of that time or that it is being taken out of context.

Dust to dust, your recycled thats your everlasting life.
I just hope I dont come back as a chicken!

The most devout Christians know for a fact that they are not good enough to make it to heaven, and never will be!

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:

Not of works, lest any man should boast. -- Ephesians 2:8,9

The good move is to quit spewing religion. In the news, the Taliban beheaded a young girl for playing volleyball ... an incredibly innocent and vulnerable child, who was someone's daughter for whom they had great love and hopes. A most heinous insult to any moral human being's sense of morality and decency. But the god of the Bible did a million times worse than this. He killed every child, and every fetus on the planet, to satisfy his vengeance ... and for something that was done by an adult thousands of years before.

There seems to me two possibilities about this. The perpetrator is a thousand times worse than Ted Bundy ... or ... the stories such as this are only stories and were obviously meant only as stories and not literal, because you can defend a moral of a story which does not include actual slaughter of human beings, but you cannot defend a story of actual slaughter of innocents and innocence. So the designers of the religion are either writing of an actual bloodthirsty tyrant or are making up apocryphal stories not to be taken literally.

And to be fair there is at least one more option that believers hold on to: that it is perfect love and righteousness that motivates the killing of children a million times worse than the Taliban. Either you become a moral agent or you mime this superstitious brutality from way before the Dark Ages. As Mark Twain, or Voltaire said -- no, Shakespeare -- "Hell is empty and all the devils are (right) here." Among other things, these "devils" kill children, and they apologize for the killing of millions of children.

To be fair again, it isn't because they are immoral as much as because they are indoctrinated into a belief system in which they imagine discarding or superseding it is evil ... even as the slaughter, genocide, bigotry is perpetrated. They haven't taken the step: religion is religion and reality is reality.

Apparently we have common ground on at least one thing: Killing a human fetus (i.e. an abortion) is "a most heinous insult to any moral human being's sense of morality and decency." I'm delighted that you now oppose abortion on the basis of it being a heinous act.

What a pitiful liar for religion. Because there is no other way to defend the barbaric nature of the religion. So good job ... the holy spirit at work. Holy enough to slaughter every child and fetus on earth, vouch for it, and then pose as crusaders for the unborn.

What specifically did I lie about?

I suspect there are a variety ways to defend "the barbaric nature of religion." I could be wrong though; that's just my opinion.

Leaving myself aside (I'm kinda biased); apparently you are for sure a "crusader for the unborn", since you have twice now gave God killing fetuses as an example as a terrible thing that God did. If that is not your position, please correct me. Thanks.

When someone conflates the beheading murder of a 13-year-old girl with reproductive rights, and has a philosophy degree no less, there is one possibility for the "mistake": the dishonest, devious spinning of religion.

One hardly need be a crusader for fetus rights to assess that murdering every fetus and child on earth is the abomination of abominations, and is millions of times worse by simple math than the beheading of the girl, itself a blight on morality. To call the genocide of children righteous love is to admit one is blindly obedient to barbaric beliefs of the pre-Dark Ages.

Let's try this again: What specifically did I lie about? You are certainly welcome to disagree with me and challenge my reasoning skills (or lack thereof), but on what basis am I lying or being dishonest?

Since literally everybody dies as some point, what's wrong with murder? And why is killing every fetus on Earth an "abomination?" What standard of righteousness is God beholden to in your worldview? Yours? Mine? Donald Trump's? Jon Gruden's? Peter Singer's?

Rather than providing still another generic rant, please be specific.

Thank you, and be well and stay safe!

addendum: Planned Parenthood has killed more human lives than the Taliban could ever even dream about. So-called Abortion Rights advocates are far more evil than the Taliban.

[QUOTE=lagtight;57370888]Let's try this again: What specifically did I lie about? You are certainly welcome to disagree with me and challenge my reasoning skills (or lack thereof), but on what basis am I lying or being dishonest?

I'll quote myself:

"When someone conflates the beheading murder of a 13-year-old girl with reproductive rights, and has a philosophy degree no less, there is one possibility for the "mistake": the dishonest, devious spinning of religion."

So the very epistemology of your apologetics is fraudulent. Which is dishonest. Which is a lie. So there it is spelled out since you needed to "try this again," in spite of your philosophy degree. LOL. I think your apologetics is in ascendance over your philosophy, which is no surprise as you describe philosophy as worthless even as you inexplicably taught it. I think you get confused when you have to think, "Well, let's see. My god killed every child and fetus on earth. I have to call this moral and loving in order to be a good believer. So obviously, I need to deceive, myself first, and then anyone else who will fall for it. God bless those who believe in the savagery of the pre-Dark Ages morality, and sacrifice their philosophy and their very mind to do it."

[QUOTE=lagtight;57370888]Let's try this again: What specifically did I lie about? You are certainly welcome to disagree with me and challenge my reasoning skills (or lack thereof), but on what basis am I lying or being dishonest?

I'll quote myself:

"When someone conflates the beheading murder of a 13-year-old girl with reproductive rights, and has a philosophy degree no less, there is one possibility for the "mistake": the dishonest, devious spinning of religion."

So the very epistemology of your apologetics is fraudulent. Which is dishonest. Which is a lie. So there it is spelled out since you needed to "try this again," in spite of your philosophy degree. LOL. I think your apologetics is in ascendance over your philosophy, which is no surprise as you describe philosophy as worthless even as you inexplicably taught it. I think you get confused when you have to think, "Well, let's see. My god killed every child and fetus on earth. I have to call this moral and loving in order to be a good believer. So obviously, I need to deceive, myself first, and then anyone else who will fall for it. God bless those who believe in the savagery of the pre-Dark Ages morality, and sacrifice their philosophy and their very mind to do it."

[QUOTE=FellaGaga-52;57371216] The above is unremittingly stupid, even for you.

1. I am against beheading 13-year-old girls.

2. I am in favor of Reproductive Rights (i.e. all women have a right to decide if and when to become pregnant). A woman and her Witch Doctor conspiring to slaughter her unborn baby is not "reproductive freedom" unless one is going full-Orwell.

When I taught Philosophy I thought it was a wonderful and important subject and I enjoyed teaching it very much.

Religion is deviously evil and there is little wonder or mystery why philosophy degrees are deemed worthless by those in its grip. I do stand corrected concerning the inanity of debating with them ... not something I've ever been involved with until a couple years ago when I wrote a book on the subject and was appalled by the responses of true believers of many ilks ... all, of course, with the one true belief. I was under the mistaken impression there was a give and take of ideas and, of course again, ran into a brick wall of pitiful indoctrination of all variants. Go figure. Well, like I said, I hadn't been involved in it before so I didn't fully realize this.

Beneath the intransigent "belief" of the religious, is not really belief at all (as many who de-convert attest), but just a colossally stubborn need for certainty and to be ruled by some omnipotence. The denied fear is of independence, death, life, uncertainty, ostracization. They don't believe, they mime. When they de-convert, the thoughtful among them say things like, "You know, I never really did have any reason to believe. There was just this enormous reflex in me, covering something, I don't know what, that the answer to seemed to be religious zeal."

Now that's thinking about religion and how it is being employed in the psyche. Miming out of anxiety and reflex ... not so much.

There is often a lot of psychobabble in your rants (like above).

Psychological reductionism is the last refuge of someone without an argument. - Dennis Prager (I'm quoting from memory this response to a caller on a radio show he was co-hosting about 30(!) years ago).

Psychology is one of the few academic disciplines more consistently stupid than Philosophy (in my humble opinion, of course).

While you're criticizing cutting edge psychological analysis, go drink some blood, worship a god for being so loving and righteous as to kill countless children and fetuses, and practice your bigotry borrowed from before the Dark Ages. It's that enlightenment thing you've got going on, the one that calls philosophy worthless and savage magic relics as wise. Man blames his bigotry on god, you fool. Wake up. The whole thing is a classic, textbook projection, right down to: "I sure would like to have a perfect father."

You're done. You're as done as anyone has ever been. Until you say, "Well, there might be a problem with some of this" ... you are a perpetrator of evil and ignorance under the guise of holy morality.

I've yet to see any "cutting edge psychological analysis" in any of your posts, so I'm not clear on how that's relevant at this point.

As usual, the rest of your post is just a rant, and is therefore unworthy of any consideration by me.

(Maybe someone on the cutting-edge of Psychological Analysis can explain your obsessive, maniacal hatred for religion.)

Be well and stay safe!

@FellaGaga-52: Just out of curiosity, were you raised in a religious household?

Not particularly. I explained my evisceration of this bullshyt ... it started over a book I wrote that got the same kind of review from the religious of the ilk that the Liar Lagtight offers on here, and oddly, got stellar reviews from the non-indoctrinated. LOL. Oh, and it came up incredibly synchrnoistically at the poker table the very night I submitted the final edits, with a guy who took a poll of atheists versus theists at the table. It came down to me, and the poll taker counted me a theist because I called the quantum field "god." And whatever I said about science, the dude kept saying, "Jesus created that." I'm here to tell you I said, Jesus didn't know much about quantum realities, let alone create it. And a good point someone made on here: if you are hashing it out like this part of the reason is your own baggage. True, of course. We are always coming from our own frame of reference, can't get away from that.

The whole belief system is utterly established as apocryphal religion designing, like all the rest right back to Zeus, and when faced with it they play the ad hominem/deception card while calling themselves truth seekers, utterly self-deluded and unconcerned with updating the worldview of thousands of years ago. Amen.

The book is about a rational, natural spirituality inherent in the nature of mankind's consciousness, as opposed to all this magic crap of supernatural spirituality/religion. Which of course doesn't go over too well with a certain crowd, and which many, many remain ignorant of because of religions dominance in spiritual understanding.

A look at what is claimed to be abomination is helpful. In a religion whose god kills millions of children in cold blood, and whose adherents give this the nod as moral, righteous and loving, certainly not an abomination ... and whose god then declares wearing the wrong clothes a real abomination .... in a world like this, hell is empty and the evil is in the believing.