Schooling theists on the stupidity of objective morality

"Capturing Christianity" invited Dr. Anne Jeffrey to write an article on the following subject:

CC021: If God Does Not Exist, Why Be a Moral Person?

I responded there, and somebody ("T.N.") who parrots Frank Turek's "argument for God from objective morality" challenged me with the typical "why should one bag of chemicals care about another bag of chemicals" stuff. See here. So far (July 31, 2019), TN has complained that my asking him/her/both/other to agree to the dictionary definition of "objective" made our debate more complicated than it needs to be

!?

Just in case that forum deletes the discussion, I cross-post our exchange here to make sure it is preserved.  Let's just say that Frank Turek will probably think it best to drop trying to prove god from "objective morality" if he gets hold of this discussion.

I already trounced Christian philospher Matthew Flannagan on the same subject, to the point that he stopped responding right exactly when he was hit with the hardest questions the relativists can ask.  See here.

from Barry

Not sure why Christians think it impossibly difficult for atheists to give a rational and normative justification for acting morally while denying god’s existence. If even Christians themselves disagree on a large host of moral issues (i.e., death penalty, divorce, birth control, gun control, the minimum age for marriage, the point when pre-marital petting becomes fornication, how often to bathe, how often to attend church, how disastrous or trivial “sin” is, etc, etc), then it doesn’t matter if a quick “God’s mysterious ways” can help you save face at that point; those Christian in-house disagreements about morality still rationally justify the skeptic to say it is more than likely that those disagreements exist because there is no god in the first place, therefore, there is no ultimately transcendent source of morality, therefore, being without ultimate guidance, mammals on this earth who compete for resources are naturally going to be in a perpetual state of moral disagreement. We are nothing but roaming dogs growling at each other after we both spot a fresh kill at the same time, we are merely a higher developed type of mammal. Asking how we can know which person is “right” as two people fight, is about as stupid as asking how we can know which bug is in the “right” as a spider attacks a fly. There is no reason to posit there is any moral “right” in the first place, therefore, the question is invalid, except in the uselessly subjective sense of which participant we think has views closer to our own standard of morality.

Furthermore, if you think morality is “objective”, you aren’t doing your job by presuming child rape to be objectively immoral, then asking the atheist to explain why they find it to be immoral. YOU are the one asserting such act to be “objectively” immoral, therefore YOU have the burden to demonstrate such. You aren’t demonstrating such by blindly appealing to the fact that “most people” think child rape is intolerable. If that act is “objectively” immoral, then because “objective” means “true for reasons independent of human opinion”, you should be able to demonstrate such objectivity without appeal to any human-based opinion or belief.

Finally, the atheist-argument that “god” as viewed in traditional religion, constitutes an incoherent proposition, necessarily makes any coherent naturalistic explanation for morality more likely or plausible. If the naturalistic explanation is at least coherent, it has much more going for it than any “god did it” explanation.
In short, not only does the atheist have good arguments for the purely naturalistic origin of human morality, but the atheist remains rationally justified even if they choose to cut off the discussion before hearing every last little trifle the apologist can marshal.

from T N

Barry,

When you say “Christians” or “theists” claim this or that, I would say you are pointing to people who happen to be largely philosophically incompetent (of which there are admittedly many). The question of whether or not God is necessary for morality can be understood in two senses: One is the question of whether or not a person needs to be an explicit theist in order to be moral, and, quite obviously one need not be (I believe you are arguing against this sense). The other is whether or not one can show by philosophical argument that morality is necessarily the result of a transcendent cause (i.e. God) independent of whether or not a given person understands morality as having its origin in such a cause.

As an Aristotelian I have no problem with arguments that base morality on natural causes such as “enlightened self interests”, or “survival of the herd”, or what have ya. But, this approach does not complete the argument because these claims lead to further questions as to the nature of “enlightened self interests”, etc. all of which can be shown to further depend on irreducible causes. For example: you offer an argument for the relative nature of morality and its indeterminacy, but you presume your analysis itself to be objective, abstract, and mind independent. Why? If morality is merely the product of some given neurons zigging instead of zagging, why do you presume your evaluation of the question to transcend merely material causes? In the act of denying objective morality, you are asserting that your opponents are objectively wrong. If you believe your position, you cannot assert that “wrong” exists. Your opponents are merely chemicals that produce a given result. There is no basis for claiming that chemical reactions can be “wrong”.

barry
Well, I just deleted several pages of detailed reply to you, because I sometimes overlook my own higher goal to resolve my disagreements with people like you one tiny step at a time. Most mature educated adults realizing that the more comprehensive the reply, the greater risk that important points will be avoided, lost or skipped…especially in the context of back and forth bickering on the internet and not on the context of the controlled confines of an academic debate.

My rebuttal to you was objective, but only on the condition that the dictionary has correctly defined “objective”. I wasn’t claiming pure objectivity, I was merely assuming you agree with me that the dictionary correctly defines the word “objective”.

Do you agree with the “being outside of the mind and independent of it.” definition of “objective” as provided by Merriam-Webster, yes or no?

T N
It’s not that complicated; simple English works fine. The question is why get mad at chemicals? Suppose I said that toothpaste is “wrong” because it doesn’t do photosynthesis. How does it make sense to say that chemicals have violated some hierarchy of values? Theists (and atheists) are merely chemicals that have their respective properties, how is it “wrong” for chemicals to possess the properties they have? What standard has been violated?
If you believe your position, you should just say you think what you think because your brain chemicals have that property, not that your brain chemicals can identify some objective, mind independent standard that has been violated. No?

barry
You said: “The question is why get mad at chemicals?”

I reply: No, you asked me to reply to your criticism of relative morality.

I made clear in my reply that I will be proceeding one baby step at a time.

I am taking one baby step at a time in order to establish as much common ground between us as possible on the issue of morality.

People who have more common ground on an issue are more likely to successfully resolve their differences, than people who have little or no common ground on the issue they argue about.

I will not permit you to jump away from my criticism just because you fear you cannot answer it without creating horrific empistemological problems for yourself.

The question is

Do you agree with the “being outside of the mind and independent of it.” definition of “objective” as provided by Merriam-Webster, yes or no?

If you object that using the dictionary to establish common ground between us on the issue of word-meanings unnecessarily infuses extra complications or confusion into the debate, please say so.

If you object that asking you to agree with the dictionary definition of “objective” is fallacious or otherwise somehow unnecessarily diminishes our ability to establish common ground here, then just say so.

If you think establishing common ground is a bad way to attempt to resolve your disagreement with another person, just say so.

What I fear from your latest reply is that you appear to think proceeding in baby steps is a bad idea (!?), when in fact because our positions are so radically opposed to one another already, our coming to agreement on as many possible facts about morality as we can, would obviously be crucial to resolving our dispute (or enabling the reader to more clearly determine who “won” this debate).

T N
Yes.
Does “mind”= brain?

barry
Yes. Does “bodily strength” = muscle? Or would you deny this common sense because some ancient text insists that bodily strength comes from another dimension and merely manifests using the muscles as a mere interface?

T N
Following your lead with “baby steps”, please cite any claims I made about “ancient texts”? Once you do that, I can answer your question about what my point is.

barry
I have no obligation to help you distract the discussion about your alleged prior claims about “ancient texts” as I never expressed or implied that you ever made any such claims. Go read my post again. I was “asking” you whether you would deny a common sense thing because of something written in an ancient text. The comment you refer to was in the form of a question, a question you chose to avoid answering.
Now that I’ve “done that”, do what you promised, and answer my question about what your point is, that is, your point in asking me whether I think mind = brain.

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-------will update later.

Atheist reply to Triablogue's typical Reformation preaching

This is my reply to an article at Triablogue entitled

Monday, July 29, 2019

The anatomy of unbelief

An excerpt from Fool's Talk by Os Guinness.

Posted by Hawk at 3:03 PM 

Do we truly seek to conform our thinking to reality, or do we also seek to conform reality to our thinking?

Fallacy of loaded question.  Humans are routinely guilty of both.

Is this clash between truth seekers and truth twisters merely a problem for intellectuals and those who enjoy the life of the mind?

It would seem so, given that the vast majority of humans shy away from intellectual jousting and simply run on autopilot...more worried about Twitter and Trump than truth.

Or are all humans double-faced, "dissonance in human form," as Nietzsche expressed it?

I agree with Nietzsche, and so does the bible.  See Romans 3:4, 7:18, 1st Cor. 2:14

What does Kant's view of the "crooked timber" of our humanity mean for our thinking and understanding?

Not much, its just an overstatement about humanity's negative tendencies.  Not much different than the pissed off man who says "this world is a nut house".

And what is it that W. H. Auden glimpses when he writes that "the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews"? Is this merely a colorful metaphor, or is there more there that we should take seriously?

same answer.

The Bible's answer takes us to the very heart of its diagnosis of unbelief, for in the biblical view the central core of the anatomy of unbelief stems from its willful abuse of truth.

Which means you are a fundamentalist, and nothing about the obvious reality of Semitic exaggeration (Copan and Flannagan, 2010) makes you fear such tendencies infected the bible's theological statements.   When in fact is Copan and Flannagan are right, they are opening the door to the stark possibility that many bible passages, whose literal interpretation has been the basis of Christian doctrine for centuries, were never intended to be taken that literally.

In our treatment of truth we, and all human beings, are at the same time both truth seekers and truth twisters, and in a deep, mercurial, tenacious and fateful way. Sometimes we seek to conform our thinking to reality, and just as often we try to conform reality to our thinking.

Then you might wish to have a talk with that other guy who posts regularly at Triablogue...Steve Hays.  he is a staunch 5-point Calvinist.  His acceptance of the 1st point of Calvinism forbids him from saying anything morally good about non-Christians.  Sin has blinded them, and if predestined by God to go to hell, any "good" about them is purely temporal and thus too insignificant to be worthy of discussion.

As Sir Thomas More's protagonist Hythloday argued in his Utopia, and the seventeenth-century Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole argued later, human beings "not being willing to render their actions to conform to the Law of God,

Then these men apparently never read Luke 1:6, they weren't inerrantists.

have endeavored to render the Laws of God to conform to their actions."

again, typical overstatement by a conservative Christian with Reformed leanings.

From Genesis and the story of the fall onward, a host of passages convey this understanding,

And a host of passages show the sinner's ability to actually please god by obeying the law. Luke 1:6, Luke 19:8-9, see also Moses' statement that obeying the entire law is not too difficult (Deuteronomy 30:11), and King David's boast that God approved of him because David was actually righteous in conformity to God's law (Psalm 7:8, 18:20-25, etc).  It is precisely the "earn your salvation by conformity to the law" stuff in the bible that forced millions of inerrantists to recognize that the only way to maintain biblical inerrancy is to become a dispensationalist (i.e., God's rules for salvation of humanity changed several times between Adam and Paul). Whereas a better explanation is theological evolution...later generations of biblical authors became dissatisfied with the old way and created new ways. 

but one of the deepest is in the first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans.

Seems much wiser to build one's doctrinal foundation upon the one authority that is least likely to be wrong, Jesus, then argue that because the word of the undisputed Lord is sufficient, the complexities and potential for heresy brought about by trying to trust theological teachings more distant from Christ than the gospels, justifies shitcanning them.

Unfortunately, while the synoptic Jesus obviously thought people to be sinners, he didn't believe this made them wholly incapable of pleasing god apart from "grace".  The Jesus of John's gospel is mostly fictionalized history, and in the judgment of most Christian scholars, historical truth about Jesus is less secure in John and more secure in Matthew, Mark and Luke.  That much should have been obvious immediately after one reads the esoteric first verse of John. And his belief that you've seen all you need to see to get saved, after you merely read his words (John 20:31) is in sheer contradiction to today's Christian apologist, who denies that your reading of the gospel of John is perfectly sufficient to render you inexcusably accountable to God.  If they seriously believed that, they would find studies in the historical reliability of the gospels and all of the more complex issues that attend modern Christian apologetics efforts as utterly unnecessary and likely to introduce more complexity and confusion into the picture.

Bursting with gratitude and pride at the glory and power of the gospel and its way of righting wrong in the world, the apostle turns to consider human disobedience and its consequences. Among the many claims he makes in a famous passage on sin and cultural degeneration, he asserts that those who disobey God "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Rom 1:18).

Sort of like saying that if you disobey the posted speed limit, you are suppressing the truth of the speed limit.  Yet you don't know of any Christians that have ever drawn such extreme negative conclusions from disobedience to speed limit laws.  But Paul's argument for the entire worlds' accountability before god is worthy of dismissal since he premises his conclusion on his prior recounting of how a small portion of humanity once knew god and then apostatized.  The truth of ancient Israelite apostasy does not dictate what's true about every human being, and Romans 1:21 sets the context as the humans who once knew god, a description that is not true for the vast majority of human beings in history.  So Paul's induction from a small sample to a large generalization at this point is utterly fallacious.  You may as well conclude from the Calvinists that live in the United States, that everybody in the world knows that Calvinism is biblically justified..which would then, under your logic, compel the conclusion that Arminians secretly believe Calvinism is biblical, sin just makes them wish very hard that it was wrong.  Little else could represent prideful blindness than the Calvinist who is so cocksure in his imperfect theological opinions.

The Bible uses many strong terms to describe unbelief, including hardening, twisting, blindness, deafness, unnaturalness, lies, deception, folly, rebellion and madness,

The bible also uses absolute terms when recounting God's demand that his people slaughter children.  In Deuteronomy 20:13-17, the command to destroy all of the people in the nations near Israel is set in contrast to the prior command to spare the woman and children of the nations further away. If we must nevertheless agree with Copan and Flannagan (2010) that such absolute terms were a case of typical Semitic exaggeration (i.e., God didn't want the Israelites to kill off every last man woman and child in the nearby nations), we have to wonder just how many other words in the bible, whose surface meaning has been the basis for Christian doctrine for centuries, are in reality just more mere Semitic exaggeration.  You can start with Paul's out-of-context quotes in Romans 3:10-19.

but none repays reflection more than Paul's phrase in Romans. At the heart of sin and disobedience, Paul says, is a flagrantly deliberate and continuing act of violence to truth.

But common sense says not every transgression is willful.. Given how much the case for God and Christianity sucks, I have no fears that maybe the common sense is false merely because it contradicts the bible, I'm rather inclined to say if it contradicts the bible, its chances of being truthful are dramatically increased.

Sin and disobedience lay hold of truth, grasp it roughly, and will not let it be what it naturally is or say what it naturally says.

Or maybe human beings are just intelligent mammals and when they steal bubble gum from the corner store at 6 years old, it is nowhere near as complex as you dream, its about as simple as a dog stealing food from another dog.

In this way, the deliberate dynamic of unbelief is to suppress truth, stifle truth and hold truth hostage.

I can do that better that you:  When you disobey god's law, you are using a red hot steak knife to vaginally rape the innocent baby of truth while using a hammer to claw out its eyes while gleefully laughing at its groans of pain and misery...all while on national tv as the parents look on and die from grief alone.  If you are going to engage in obvious overstatement to make your readers remember whatever lesson you intend, why set limits?  The more shockingly gross the metaphor, the more likely your intended audience will get and retain the message, amen?

What may be known about God, Paul says, is quite evident still, but it is adamantly denied by the determined act of will that is sin and unbelief.

Only because he engages in the fallacy of induction and uses the apostasy of the ancient Israelites to broadbrush all of humanity.

The phrase grasp the nettle is too weak to picture what Paul is talking about, but it does begin to capture how the sheer force of a grip can be enough to counter the normal thrust of the nettle's sting. The experience of a hijacking comes far closer. When a terrorist hijacks a plane and holds the passengers hostage, he can put a gun to the head of the pilot and force him to fly wherever the terrorist wants, anywhere other than its intended destination. Just so, says Paul, unbelief looks at the undeniable truth of God's universe and at the unbeliever's own nature made in the image of God, but then denies their true force, suppresses their real meaning and turns their proper destination into a different one.

I have to wonder how many asshole Christian parents will use such glowing metaphor while scolding their children for typical disobedience.  Is little johnny holding his mother's imposed 9 p.m. bedtime "hostage", with a gun to its head...(!?)  What a fucking fool you are to imitate the ways of the deluded biblical authors.

The prophet Micah had charged that Israel's false leaders "twist everything that is straight" (Mic 3:9 NASB), but Paul goes deeper in analyzing that the heart of unbelief centers on its active abuse of truth.
It would be a mistake to hurry past this phrase or dismiss it as only a dramatic metaphor, for Paul's point grounds and underscores a variety of themes that run throughout the entire Scriptures when describing sin.

Only if you are sure that the typical Semitic exaggeration that Copan and Flannagan (2010) say inhere in biblical statement, do not inhere in Paul's admittedly Semitic styled writings.  But once you allow that Semitic exaggeration might also be true within Paul's theological statements, it assures the death of conservative Christian theology.  Every time the bible talks shit about non-Christians, this is likely just typical overstatement by an ancient Semitic author, or ancient Semitic NT author clearly trying to imitate the OT author.

Four prominent emphases recur most frequently, and together they form a multilayered view of the dark willfulness of sin, disobedience and unbelief.
First, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of suppression. Unbelief seizes truth, grasps it roughly, silences its voice and twists it away from God's intended purpose. By itself, truth speaks naturally and clearly, but its voice is censored, blocked and silenced, so that it is no longer allowed to speak as it does naturally:
They say to God, "Leave us alone; we do not want to know Your ways." (Job 21:14 NLV)
You who hate correction
and turn your back when I am speaking? (Ps 50:17 NEB)
They have denied the LORD,
saying, "He does not exist." (Jer 5:12 NEB)
For crime after crime of Edom
I will grant them no reprieve,
because, sword in hand, they hunted their kinsman down,
stifling their natural affections. (Amos 1:11 NEB)
Second, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of exploitation. Unbelief not only suppresses the real truth and twists it away from God's true ends, but wrests it toward its own ends and its own agenda.
The men who now live in Jerusalem have said, "Keep your distance from the LORD; the land has been made over to us as our property." (Ezek 11:15 NEB)
But you trusted to your beauty and prostituted your fame. (Ezek 16:15 NEB)
O Tyre, you said,
"I am perfect in beauty," . . .
they hung shield and helmet around you,
and it was they who gave you your glory. (Ezek 27:4, 10 NEB)
Your beauty made you arrogant,
you misused your wisdom to increase your dignity. (Ezek 28:17 NEB)
Listen to this, leaders of Jacob,
rulers of Israel,
you who make justice hateful
and wrest it from its straight course. (Mic 3:9 NEB)
Third, unbelief goes further still and abuses truth through a deliberate act of inversion. Unbelief not only suppresses truth and exploits it for its own ends, but seizes it and turns it completely upside down, inside out and the wrong way around, and then holds it there for its own purposes. Above all, through inversion we as creatures put ourselves in the place of our Creator, and we believe our own lie rather than God's truth. We make ourselves gods instead of God, so that proper self-love becomes prideful self-centering love. As Niebuhr states bluntly, "In an ultimate sense the self never knows anything against itself." In terms of truth, we are always self-right. In terms of goodness, we are always self-righteous. And in terms of God, we are always our own gods.

In John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Satan is unequivocally clear: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" or "Evil, be thou my good." Sartre expressed this dynamic famously when he said, "To be man means to reach toward being God." And before him, Nietzsche declared in the same spirit, "If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god?" Carl Gustav Jung recognized that this was the heart of Nietzsche's assertion of the Superman. It is "the thing in man that takes the place of God." After the triumph of the Russian revolution, Lenin even had "God-defying" towers designed to demonstrate his Babel-like and Promethean pretentions, though most of them were never built. As these examples show, sin is essentially and willfully narcissistic, and it includes both a truth claim ("God is dead") and a task ("I am now out to be God in my life").

Dismissed. 

Sin, then, is the claim to the right to myself,

And I'm guessing you think it fallacious for a human being to assume they have a purely naturalistic right to themselves.  What's next?  Presuppositionalism?  The unbeliever cannot even cough without thereby proving by his actions that Jesus rose from the dead?  LOL.  Or maybe you aren't really sure exactly how much time I should spend responding to Jeff Durbin and Steve Hays, or how much time I should spend reading Christian evidentialist critiques of Van Til?

and all our worldviews as unbelievers are in part a shrine to ourselves.

But since the bible's warning against idolatry are about as serious as a toddler's warning to "gimmie", it really doesn't matter if non-Christian views constitute idolatry.

This can be seen most clearly when atheism declines naturally into its religious phase, as it so often does (as in Auguste Comte's "religion of humanity," Alain de Botton's "religion for humanity" or Sam Harris's atheistic "spirituality"). We humans then become both idolater and idol, though we mask the folly from ourselves. The absurdity betrays itself, however, in various odd developments that take place. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, pointed out that the same people who scornfully dismiss the doctrine of three persons in one God as irrational, think nothing of worshiping seven billion persons in one God.

then count me out. As an atheist, I don't view anything as a "god".  That's not going to become fallacious merely because you ascribe to some asinine theory that equates one's efforts to survive and thrive, with "idolatry".  You may as well say I have turned a piece of dust in to an idol shine because I chose to wipe it off the table without asking God's permission to do so.  But we already knew you weren't writing for anybody except those who already agree with your beliefs.  So you are forgiven for the absurd weakness of whatever you are "defending".

Such statements are only the modern corroboration of the biblical view of sin, and the reason why John Calvin spoke of our human hearts as an idol-making factory.

According to 1st Kings 9:4, you'll have to exempt King David from that criticism (despite the fact that he was a polygamist and guilty of the capital crimes of adultery and murder).  Unless you wish to create disaster by committing to the premise that this bible verse is a case of typical Semitic exaggeration? Gee, I wonder how many other bible verses, whose literal surface meaning is the basis for the most ancient Christian doctrines, were also mere typical Semitic exaggeration?  Might we start with biblical statements that Jesus is God?

St. Paul made the same point centuries earlier. Unbelievers reject God and, in an act of absurd inversion, worship the creature rather than the Creator.

What would you say to a crazy unbeliever who was intentionally starving themselves to death?  If you had any Christian compassion, you would encourage them to eat something.  But according to your above-cited logic, you'd be encouraging them to commit idolatry, since without more, their taking your advice would result in their eating before they accepted Christ as savior, and according to your logic, doing ANYTHING in absence of faith amounts to worshiping the creature more than the creator.  The sheer stupidity of your logic is precisely why i occasionally exclaim "FUCK YOU" to the person I'm critiquing. I have no patience for fence posts who pose as theologians.

They swap the splendor of the immortal and infinite God for breakable images of things that are puny and mortal like ourselves,

You are assuming the bible-god is infinite.  Many Christians, called open-theists, would disagree.  What materials on the open theism/classical theism in-house Christian debate do you recommend I read, and how much time do you recommend I spend studying the subject before you'll agree it's enough to justify me in starting to draw ultimate conclusions about the issue...and how do you know your recommendations are reflecting God's desires?  (or do you get around that by simply being a Calvinist, and like Steve Hays, conveniently ascribe to God's infallible predestining decree just anything that pops out of your mouth?)

and they exchange the natural, God-given view of sexuality for unnatural forms.

that doesn't describe me.  I'm an atheist and I argue that all forms of male homosexuality are no less a deviation from nature than sexual intercourse between an adult man and a two year old girl.

Earlier still, the Hebrew prophets focused on this same inversion, and excoriated the skeptics and the enemies of God for the ludicrous absurdity of what they were doing in worshiping idols.
Shall the axe set itself up against the hewer,
or the saw claim mastery over the sawyer,
as if a stick were to brandish him who wields it,
or the staff of wood is to wield one who is not wood? (Is 10:15 NEB)
How you turn things upside down,
as if the potter ranked no higher than the clay!
Shall the thing made say of its maker, "He did not make me"?
Shall the pot say of the potter, "He has no skill"? (Is 29:16 NEB)
In your arrogance you say, "I am a god; I sit throned like a god on the high seas." Though you are a man and no god, you try to think the thoughts of a god. (Ezek 28:2 NEB)

Semitic exaggeration, you are building your doctrines on an incorrectly literal reading of those texts.

Fourth, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of deception that ends in its own self-deception. Unbelief seizes God's truth, twists it away from God's purposes and toward its own, and is therefore forced to deny the full reality of the truth it knows.

Steve Hays, a Calvinist, would disagree.  In his word of absolutely infallible predestination, a world where God has secretly willed everything people do, including their violations of god's revealed will, any notion that somebody acted contrary to god's will, is logically impossible.  But if you more correctly stated that by sinning we disobey God's "revealed will",  we will naturally point out that because you didn't say our sin violates god's secret will, it remains possible that our sins are considered good by the god who wanted us to sin that way, in which case God has no moral right to bitch at us, lest you stupidly commit yourself to the premise that your god condemns and otherwise bitches at people for doing exactly what he wanted them to do, when he wanted them to do it, how he wanted them to do it, and where he wanted them to do it.

But in the futile act of trying to deny the undeniable, it both deceives others and deceives itself, and so becomes self-deceived.

But since this was in conformity to the (secret) will of God, God's condemning such activity is akin to the parent who disciplines and condemns a child for doing an act that the parent took great pains to make sure the child would commit.  God is like the parent who instructs the teen to avoid drinking alcohol, then leaves her alone for a week in a house stocked full of her favorite liquor, then pretends to be all upset when the inevitable happens...then the parent pretends she herself cannot be blamed for facilitating the sin because she didn't reveal her "secret" will that the daughter disobey mom's "revealed" will. FUCK YOUR GOD.  See here.

Unbelief therefore manufactures not only idols but illusions.

And if these are in conformity to God's secret will, your god would have to be insane to be angry that people manufactured idols and illusions.  You will say God doesn't get "angry" but the OT passages that say different must be interpreted in the light of how the originally intended largely pre-literate goat herders would have understood it.  Deuteronomy 9:19-20 says God has hot anger toward sinners, and NT writers themselves take the same type of language in literal fashion to prop up their own theological opinions.  See Hebrews 10:28-29, 1st Corinthians 10:6-11.

The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions."

and under Calvinism, who wanted human minds to operate this way?  The same god that condemns them for acting according to the sinful nature he wanted them to be plagued with?  How about the nurse who intentionally infects a child with AIDS, then condemns the child for exhibiting the symptoms that naturally attend having AIDS?  FUCK YOU.  No wonder you fucking idiots have a doctrine that god's ways are mysterious.  You already know biblical bullshit doesn't wash.

26 In that sense, all unbelieving worldviews are not only a shrine to those who hold them but a shelter from God and his truth.
The logic behind this drive to deception and self-deception is simple. If sin is the claim to "the right to myself," it includes the claim to "the right to my view of things." And since we are each finite, "my view of things" is necessarily restricted and simply cannot see the full picture. We therefore turn a blind eye to all other ways of seeing things that do not fit ours, and especially to God's view of things. As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are."

That's total bullshit and philosophically contradictory.  There is no such thing as living different than what you are.  The man who dresses and acts like a woman cannot do a successful job of it.  Not even God can do this, therefore, he would not have the power to create any life form that could do it.  But since you Christians believe in other similarly contradictory theology, like Jesus being a single person composed of "two natures", I guess we should expect such ignorance to seep into your other beliefs.

There is therefore a close link between the prideful love of self, its aversion to the full truth and its creation of illusions. Kierkegaard wrote, "But spiritually understood, man in his natural condition is sick, he is in error, in an illusion, and therefore desires most of all to be deceived, so that he may be permitted not only to remain in error but to find himself thoroughly comfortable in his self-deceit."

Something the Calvinist god is pleased with because its exactly what he ordered. 

St. Augustine and his later disciples, such as Pierre Nicole, developed the same point. A key part of deception and self-deception is the fact that evil must imitate good, unbelief must copy truth, and vice must mimic virtue. Thus whereas properly ordered love relates everything to God in trust,

In which case, the little girl who gets mad at god for not protecting her from rape, is inexcusably guilty of idol worship.

gratitude and humility, improperly ordered self-love relates everything to itself in prideful self-love. Such pride works constantly on behalf of its own body and its own mind in two ways. First, it serves the self-love of its body through the pursuit of pleasures; and second, it serves the self-love of its mind through the pursuit of approval and honor.
Needless to say, the latter is fateful as the source of our human hypocrisy. If we can act so as to produce the appearance and effects of proper love in spite of motives that are quite contrary and come from improper self-love, we can appear to be honorable and generous before our fellow humans. Just so did the Pharisees love to pray on street corners in the sight of all, and just so many big givers have loved to have their benefactions trumpeted to all when there is little real love behind their generosity. Just so, as we shall see later, does sin's imitation of good deeds provide a stalking horse for hypocrisy. We may despise blatant self-love when we see it in others, and we certainly do not want others to see it in us. So we mask our own motives to produce the consequences that will win us the approval and admiration of others. In Nicole's words, this is a "Traffick of Self-love," but one in which we "find satisfaction in this lovely Idea of ourselves."
The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness. This theme is prominent in St. Augustine's Confessions, and comes directly from his own radical self-scrutiny in light of the teaching of the Bible. "Falsehood," he wrote, "is nothing but the existence of something which has no being." But if this is so, "He who utters falsehoods utters what is his alone," for nothing is more private than a newly minted lie. There is therefore a lie at the heart of each person's unbelief, and Augustine speaks of it as "the huge fable which I loved instead of you, my God, the long drawn lie which our minds were always itching to hear." Augustine brings all the themes together in one extraordinary passage in book 10 of Confessions:
Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

Once again, your god is a fuckhead, which seems to be the only logical explanation for why he pretends that the perfect fulfillment of hisd (secret) will by humans, makes him "angry"with them:

---Dad:   "Son, you took out the garbage in the exact time, place and manner that I secretly intended.  But in my revealed will, I told you to take out the garbage in a different time and manner.  Now shame on you for conforming perfectly to my secret will and for disobeying my revealed will!  You are grounded for a month and you should feel guilty for doing something in the exact way I actually wanted you to".
---Son: Why are you finding fault if my acts were in perfect conformity to your secret will?  Would you have been pleased if I had disobeyed your secret will?
---Dad:  Silence!  Who are you to talk back to me?  Romans 9:20"

LOL... and FUCK YOUR DOGSHIT CALVINISM.

Some people scoff at this passage as the jaundiced thinking of a Calvinist before Calvin. But there has never been so much evidence for the omnipresence of deceit, and there has never been an age like ours that offers so many inducements to deception. For a start, this is the era of the "looking-glass self" and of "impression management," an age that is bursting with multiple reinforcements of our capacity for deception. These range from the lack of face-to-face reality in the new social media to the proliferation of modern enhancements, such as cosmetics, Viagra, Botox and plastic surgery, to the improved science of selling, propaganda and manipulation. But even these are beside the point, for modern thinking has only deepened our understanding of how human and how common deception is and always has been. As Pascal wrote centuries ago, "Human society is founded on mutual deceit."
Consider the whole treatment of the unconscious, mixed motives, rationalizations, white lies, "cognitive dissonance," alter egos and "shadow personalities." Consider the place of "active forgetfulness" and deliberate "inhibition" in Nietzsche and postmodern thinking, and the former's view of humanity as "incarnated forgetfulness." Think of the enduring appeal of books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Or consider D. H. Lawrence's reflections on our human capacity for self-deception. Human knowledge, he argued, is broadly of two kinds—the things humans tell themselves and the things they find out. The trouble is that the things humans tell themselves are nearly always pleasant, but they are lies. Why?
Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages . . . which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorous on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees the light. . . . Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes before him like the carrot before the ass.
In Marar's survey of the modern understanding of deception, he summarizes the situation simply: "Our minds are equipped with a convincing knack for cooking the facts, whether future, present or past." Can there, then, be any quarrel with the diagnosis of the Bible, which has long seen deception and self-deception as an inescapable part of human living and a core feature of unbelief? Deceit and the folly of trusting deceit are core themes in the prophets.

I'm not seeing why you are apparently trying to motivate people to disobey god's secret will that they engage in idolatry and deception. If you already believe God predestined all sin, you are a fool to carry on as if sinners have any ability to control anything in their lives, the attitude most other people have when trying to teach.

For example, Jeremiah:
The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)

Typical Semitic exaggeration.  Your theology is built on a falsely literal interpretation of ancient rhetoric.

Realism about deception and self-deception is a hallmark of the Christian mind.

more accurate to say "conservative Christian mind", because liberal Christians go nowhere near the theological house of burning cards you've constructed with this pathetically unnecessary detour into useless theologizing.

Reinhold Niebuhr was fearless in applying it to thinking about foreign relations, but how much more is it relevant to apologetics. Niebuhr argued that the folly of the modern mind is to make the precision of scientific thinking the model for all human thinking, and so to forget the bias, self-interest and moral defect at the heart of all thinking—sometimes even in thinking about science. According to his analysis, which makes St. Paul's diagnosis central, human thinking has caught itself in a triple bind. First, all human thinking is sinful. As finite, fallen and sinful creatures, our thinking can never be other than self-interested to some degree. Second, all human thinking is idolatrous. As humans made in the image of God, we still have a spiritual and rational power that can inflate even our worst and most self-interested thinking beyond its natural range. And third, all human thinking is hypocritical. Rather than acknowledging the bias and self-interest in our thinking, we are able to hide our dishonesty by aligning our ideas with higher ideals and more general interests—so that we can appear nobler and more generous than we really are.
So the moral defect perpetuates itself down through history, but we refuse to admit that our problem is much more than ignorance.

A refusal that god intended for us to engage in...leaving him no moral right to bitch, except perhaps on the condition that god's mind truly does appear to fulfill all elements humans require to be confident that the person at issue is authentically insane.  Getting mad at us for doing exactly what he wanted?  FUCK YOU.

It turns on the impossibility of genuinely disinterested thinking because of the demonic twisting of sin.

What the demons do is morally good, because the hyper-Calvinist god secretly willed it...and whatever God wants, must be a morally good thing...right?

Sin insinuates itself into all human thinking, so that even the loftiest and most high-minded thinking of both individuals and nations displays certain common features. There is, Niebuhr writes, an "implicit idolatry," a "constitutional self-righteousness," a "lurking dishonesty," a "stupidity of sin" and a "spiritual source of corruption" in history that leads to a "vain imagination" and finally to "spiritual impotence." This is the reason why human ideals are never able to fulfill the soaring visions of which they dream. It is also the reason why these recurring features stain all our thinking and sow the weeds of the ironies and unintended consequences that grow alongside our better ideas. Behind the crooked timber of our humanity are our crooked minds, and that crooked timber now warps even the brightest and best visions that flow from it.
If all this is so, can there be any question that our Christian advocacy must never be a matter of trundling out tried and trusty one-size-fits-all arguments and surefire proofs? Pascal described the challenge well. "We think playing upon man is like playing upon an ordinary organ. It is indeed an organ, but strange, shifting and changeable. Those who know only how to play an ordinary organ would never be in tune on this one. You have to know where the keys are."

Your post was a complete waste of time, since under Calvinism, god intended for humanity to engage in all the sinful behavior you describe...and if god willed it...then by logical necessity it MUST be morally good...so why are you trying to dissaude people from doing that which is morally good?  Because that sadistic lunatic you call a god simply burped and you felt obligated to bow?  LOL.

So, is it objectively morally good when a man rapes a little girl to death in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no?  Look at the logical syllogism that Calvinism and "god's secret will" implies:

Everything god wills, is by definition objectively morally good.
The Calvinist god wills men to rape children.
Therefore, the Calvinist god thinks men raping children is objectively morally good.

I thus reject Calvinism as a horrifically absurd example of the stupidity that can be put in motion when one takes bible inerrancy and bible canon further than the bible itself actually does.

Answering J. Warner Wallace on objective moral values

Some modern Christian apologists are really pushing this bullshit idea that you can prove God's existence by showing that some morals are objective, thus transcendent, and therefore, only a life-form higher than human life can properly account for the existence of such morals.  Some such apologists would be Frank Turek, Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan.

And it seems that J. Warner Wallace has decided to cast his lot into this viper pit of word-games.  

Cold Case Christianity: Quick Shot: “There are no objective moral truths”

Quick Shot: “There are no objective moral truths”

 Posted: 22 Jul 2019 01:20 AM PDT 

 Response #1:
“It sounds like you’re saying that there are no objective truths about morality, is that correct?

Yes.  Morals are nothing but opinions that we get from either genetic predisposition or environmental conditioning, or both.  Furthermore, when you appeal to what most people believe about baby torture, you are violating the dictionary definition of "objective".

If so, how can that claim about morality be true?

Because the claim "there are no objective morals" is a factual statement, not a moral statement, therefore, the statement is not self-defeating.

If there are no objective truths about morality, then your claim about morality cannot be objectively true either.

I didn't say there were no objective truths.  I said there were no objective MORAL truths. Saying "there are no objective moral truths" is not self-contradictory, as the statement is not itself a moral truth.  There's no "should" about it.

Do you see the problem?

No, what I see is that you have confused an assertion of fact with an assertion of morals.  "There are no moral absolutes" doesn't say "there are no absolutes". 

Even you would have to admit that there is at least one objective truth about morality: that there are no objective truths about morality!

But that objective truth is not itself a moral, therefore, the statement is not self-defeating.  It is a statement of fact, and doesn't include a "should" component, therefore, the statement itself not a moral and thus cannot be self-defeating.

But if there are no objective truths about morality, your claim (that there are no objective morals truths) can’t be objectively true either.

Once again, the statement "there are no objective moral truths" is not itself a moral, it is rather a claim of fact.

This kind of claim is clearly self-refuting. The challenge isn’t whether objective, moral truths exist, the challenge is simply identifying them and explaining where they come from.

Good luck trying to do that.

From where do objective moral truths come?”

Fallacy of loaded question, there are no objective moral truths, and this factual claim is not itself a moral claim so it isn't self refuting.

Response #2:
“Let me give you an example of an objective moral truth that is not based on personal opinion or cultural consensus: ‘It’s never OK to torture babies for the fun of it.’

That is the fallacy of argument by assertion, you simply toss it out there as if there's no question that everybody would agree with it, and that those who disagree with it therefore do not have any significance.  Sorry, that's not objective, that's rather "picking and choosing".  You need to demonstrate why torturing babies is absolutely immoral, and you aren't going to do that by appeal to what most people believe about it.

As rational human beings, we recognize this simple truth.

Then as rational human beings, we recognize that your god is a sadistic lunatic, for torturing a baby for 7 days before finally killing it, which must have been solely for fun since God explicitly admitted beforehand that the sin in question had been "put away" and that David thus escaped the death penalty it deserved:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. A (2 Sam. 12:11-18 NAU)

Notice, God intended for the baby to die, but prolonged that baby's suffering with some type of grievous illness that tortured the baby for 7 days.

You will trifle that God didn't torture that baby for the "fun" of it, but according to Deuteronomy 28:63, God will take just as much "delight" to inflict similar sufferings on disobedient people and their children as he takes in inflicting prosperity and people who obey. See the parental cannibalism God threatens to cause in 28:53 ff

If a person (or even an entire group of persons) claimed it was acceptable to torture babies for fun, I bet you would reject their claim and do everything you could to make sure they didn’t engage in that behavior. Why?

Because of my genetics and environmental conditioning.

Because you innately recognize that this claim is not a matter of personal opinion or cultural consensus.

But the basis for the innate recognition is genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.   If I had been raised in a criminal household or similar situation, my morals could have been corrupted enough to cause me to find fun in torturing babies after I become an adult.  Now what are you gonna do, say it is impossible to corrupt a child's morals?

You know that it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun.

Ah, you are preaching to the choir, not making an argument that refutes moral skepticism. Thanks for the clarification.  When you get in the mood to actually refute a moral skeptic, instead of just saying whatever needs to be said to make your followers feel better about their pre-chosen religion, let me know.

If you didn’t know that, we would question your sanity.

But your questioning the sanity of those who torture babies for fun, doesn't mean baby-torture is objectively immoral. 

The proper way to show a moral to be "objectively" true is to remember that the dictionary defines "objective" as

not influenced by personal beliefs or feelings;

 See here.

...then proceeding to show any moral to be objective without referring to anybody's personal beliefs or feelings.

You obviously fail that test immediately, because you immediately tried to premise the objectivity of the immorality of baby-torture on the fact that most people have personal beliefs or feelings that such act is horrifically unfair. 

Can you see how claims like this have to be objectively true?”

No, I can see that you prefer clever word games above arguments that are more plainly based on dictionary definitions of the key terms.

You know that it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun.

Then you are trying to draw the "objectivity" of the immorality out of my personal beliefs or feelings, thus violating the above-cited dictionary definition of "objective".  Thus you fail in this argument to show that baby-torture is "objectively" immoral.  Yes, I personally feel that baby torture for fun is immoral. But if you define "objective" according to the dictionary, you aren't allowed to use my personal feelings as a basis for declaring baby torture objectively wrong.  Most people think such act is wrong, but "most people" refers to most peoples' "personal feelings", again, forbidden by the dictionary definition of "objective".

Response #3:
“Some people have a hard time acknowledging the existence of objective moral truths because they seem difficult to identify. Is it wrong to lie? Maybe, but what if you are lying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings?

What if the Christian woman lies about the gun in her pocket to ward off a potential rapist?

Is it wrong to steal?

Depends on the morals of the person you ask.

Probably, but what if you’re stealing an activation code from a terrorist who wants to use it to detonate a bomb? How can any act be objectively moral (or immoral) if it can be justified in certain circumstances? Yes, it’s possible to rationalize certain acts, but to find the objective truth at the core of any action, simply add the expression, ‘for the fun of it.’

No, because the only way you can show that baby torture "for the fun of it" is immoral is by doing what you've already done...appealing to somebody else's personal feelings about the subject, thus violating the dictionary definition of "objective".

Is it ever okay to lie for the fun of it? To steal for the fun of it? The addition of these five words (‘for the fun of it’) expose the moral absolutes.

No, see above.  When you appeal to another's personal feelings about the matter, you are no longer demonstrating "objectivity".

It’s never morally acceptable to lie or steal for the fun of it.

Except when you are doing comedy to entertain others by saying things they know are not true or to get them to agree with you to a falsehood so the punch line is funny, whether in the context of professional stand-up comedy, or reading silly stories to a young child a bed-time. Once we find an exception to your proposed moral, it's no longer absolute...unless of course you wedge yourself down even further into the toilet of fundamentalism and insist that professional stand-up comedy and reading silly stories to young children at bedtime constitute sin?  Sure, you'd then escape this criticism, but you can also look forward to most of your Christian customer base thinking you went off the deep end.  They aren't going to stop watching Amy Schumer, nor are they going to stop reading nursery rhymes to their small children merely because J. Warner Wallace came up with a clever word-game.

These are objective, moral absolutes that apply to us regardless of our culture, location on the globe, or place in history. Can you see how these moral truths transcend our personal or cultural opinions?”

No.  If you are talking to a person who likes to torture babies for fun, your arguments fall completely apart, as you have nothing whatsoever to show such act to be objectively immoral, except the majority viewpoint of humanity.  But since majority views can be false, you aren't demonstrating the objectivity of the wrongness of baby torture by merely noting that "most people" despise it.

FAIL.

Answering cerebral faith on the absurdity of "before time"

Evan Minton admits his beliefs about god violate human language, but his case for blaming the limitations of human language, sucks.  The problem is with the concept, not the language used to convey it.

See here.   If the post gets deleted, here's how I replied:

barryJuly 22, 2019 at 11:13 AM

You say

"I suspect the biblical writers also struggled to convey God in the state of timelessness prior to (whoops!) creating all things."

------I find it quite revealing that you admit you cannot describe your god without violating language. As you struggle to maintain your god's existence as logically coherent, you are missing the point: If you cannot describe your god's existence without violating language, you cannot blame a skeptic for taking the language-violation to be a logic violation and concluding your view about God in this matter is illogical.

Secondly, you simply pontificate that the bible passages creating this problem shouldn't be interpreted too literally. But you give no grammatical or contextual justification for a less than literal interpretation. It appears you insist on it for no other reason than the fact that it is your only hope of surviving a fatal philosophical attack on what you believe. Regardless, its pretty clear the biblical authors believed in a logically invalid way about God, you cannot make that go away by merely pounding your fist and screaming that this would be too literal of an interpretation. Otherwise, gee, maybe the bible passages that say god has eternal love for us, are also not to be interpreted too literally...maybe they are just another of the many alleged cases of Semitic exaggeration?

Finally, your beliefs about God are indeed illogical:

Premise One: the phrase "before time began" is illogical.
Premise Two: you believe god existed "before time began"
Conclusion: therefore, this belief you have about god is illogical.

It doesn't matter if there really is some higher reality out there which goes "beyond" logic: You cannot fulfill the apologetics goal of "demonstrating" such "reality" if the only way you can do it is by violating logic. If language fails you as you try to "describe" your theology, you need to be open to the possibility that the confusion exists for the same reason that square circles also fail the language test.

No, none of your arguments for god's basic existence work, so you cannot fall back on a basic existence of some god and then pretend like the fault is with the limitations of human language.

Furthermore, I'm only interested in what the bible says. Every biblical description of god is most objectively interpreted in light of how the originally intended and pre-enlightenment audience would have understood it. Every biblical description of god in heaven indicates events there take place with no less a sense of temporal progression than they do on earth, and there is on textual evidence whatsoever in the bible that such descriptions are merely accommodating. You have no textual basis to justify arguing that the writer is merely using "language of accommodation" in such texts any more than you could argue they use that device when describing people talking to each other down here on earth.

Sorry, but you cannot blame a person for giving your theology the middle finger after they have successfully identified its language-violations. If there is a reality out there that is beyond the ability of human language to describe, that's your problem.

You might consider that your obsession with apologetics constitutes your implicit belief that the Holy Spirit does nothing in your ministry...you either prove it all with human argument like a lawyer in a trial, or you fear the jury will have no reason to think your case is sound. The Holy Spirit is nothing but a gratuitous afterthought, you only add it in because the bible says so...not because the evidence indicates there's any Holy Spirit doing anything whatsoever to convince people of Christianity. A lawyer may as well tell the jury that no matter how convincing his case is, the jury won't be able to appreciate its strength unless the tooth-fairy opens their eyes.

my latest challenge to Matthew Flannagan

Readers of this blog will note that Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan, who makes such a big deal out of the "fallacy" of moral relativity, quietly and conveniently stopped responding to me after I started battering him with justifications for moral relativity.

I recently posted another challenge to him at another one of his blogs, see here.  In case that comment gets deleted, I'm preserving it below:

Barry Jones 11 minutes ago ·

Dr. Flannagan,

What do you believe is unreasonable about the person who uses your professed degree in contemporary analytic philosophy, and their reading of the book you co-authored with Paul Copan (i.e., "Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God", specifically the parts defending Wolterstorff's Appropriation Model and Speech Act Theory), that you live in sin (i.e., for many years into the past up to and including the present, you have been and always are intentionally seeking out opportunities to "wrangle words", the sin forbidden in 2nd Timothy 2:14)?

14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers.(2 Tim. 2:14 NAU)

Is that verse so clear from its grammar and context that you can safely determine that the hair-splitting trifles of language you undeniably engage in, surely aren't what Paul was condemning in that verse?

If the atheist was forced to make a choice, which person should he view as more likely to engage in the sin of word-wrangling? The average Christian walking down the street? Or a Christian with a degree on contemporary analytic philosophy?

If you wish to insist that your ceaseless arguments with other people about the meaning of words and phrases ISN'T the type of "word-wrangling" that Paul was condemning in that verse, then please provide at least 3 different dialogue examples of the sort of arguing over the meaning of words, that you believe Paul meant the reader to understand in that verse. From the immediate context, it sure looks like Paul was condemning word-wrangling involving Christian doctrine.

What's Matt gonna do?  Wrangle with me over the proper meaning of "don't wrangle words"? LOL.

Does the bible require Christians to do apologetics?  Yes.  Does the bible allow them to do the type of apologetics that involves their wrangling of words?  No.  According to Titus 3:9-11, you don't have interactive dialogue with those who deny Paul's veracity.  You "warn" them twicej (warnings don't require dialogue), then you are to have nothing to do with them.

 9 But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.
 10 Reject a factious man after a first and second warning,
 11 knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned. (Tit. 3:9-11 NAU)

Apparently, Paul placed more restrictions on his followers, than what he allowed for himself.  Probably because he felt that apostles had more privileges than non-apostles, or had greater spiritual power so that apostles could play such games with people without being as subject to the temptations of the devil as non-apostles.  So I don't care if Paul himself wrangled words, that doesn't automatically imply he wanted his followers to imitate everything he did.  Common sense says what the NT directly commands of Christians in general is far more imposing on their conduct, than their more indirect argument that they are allowed to do just whatever they find the apostles doing.  Paul also enraged entire cities to the point of his being arrested.  Gee, does that mean Paul necessarily wanted his followers to enrage entire cities and get themselves arrested?  If you did that, you wouldn't be able to form churches and obey the stuff in the pastorals on church government.  The last comment in Acts about how the Romans soldiers allowed Paul to promote, during house arrest, the very things that got him arrested, is absolute fiction.

Answering Cerebral Faith's 4 questions, plus a whole lot more...

This is my reply to an article by Evan Minton entitled

Cerebral Faith

4 Questions Everyone Investigating The Case For Christianity Should Ask Themselves

posted by Evan Minton on July 09, 2019  

When it comes to investigating the evidences and arguments for and against worldviews, we need to realize that we human beings are not mere thinking machines; only considering the facts and logic, and generating conclusions based on hard, cold rationality. We're not perfect, and one of the effects of the fall said by theologians is said to be "The Noetic Effect", that the sin nature affects our ability to reason properly.

Maybe that explains why apostle Paul prohibited the very type of "word-wrangling" that you ceaselessly engage in:

 12 If we endure, we will also reign with Him; If we deny Him, He also will deny us;
 13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
 14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. 15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.
 16 But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, (2 Tim. 2:12-16 NAU)

That is, while you should do 'apologetics' you must still avoid "wrangling words".  See Titus 3:9-11 for an example of Paul's idea of how to convince those who are in error.  they get two chances to shut up and confess Paul's belief true. If they persist in disagreeing with Paul, you avoid them thereafter.  There is no "constantly discussing" the issue.  Like so many other apologetics blogs and websites, you appear dedicated to violated this word-wrangling prohibition with all of your might, on a rather consistent basis.

Then you increase your sin by using your word-wrangles as a means to make money, by asking people to donate money and in exchange they can have more access to your word-wrangles.

Sin doesn't completely debilitate us from reasoning. If that were the claim, it would be self-refuting in nature for we could ask "Did you use your reason to come to the conclusion that you cannot trust reason?"

Good point, so apparently you agree that Paul erred by pushing the human/pot analogy too far in Romans 9:20-22?  I have to wonder why Paul didn't absolve sinners of sin right there, since under his pressing logic, pots avoid doing lots of things, such as "sinning".

Nevertheless, we need to be aware that biases, emotional like or dislike of implications, and other things can lead us away from the truth.

So can the belief that the Holy Spirit is empowering you to believe whatever you believe.  This "holy spirit" crap is precisely what makes many fundamentalists equally as close-minded to their errors as you think atheists are.  What's sad is that you'd think by being at least "Christians", the fundamentalists would have a somewhat better track record of recognizing when they have erred.  But no.

None of us is immune, whether we are Christian or Non-Christian, and each one of us needs to do deep introspection when we're evaluating competing systems of thought.

on the contrary, you are to blindly presuppose that anything against Christ is automatically from the devil:

24 The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged,
 25 with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth,
 26 and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. (2 Tim. 2:24-26 NAU)

Minton continues:

In this blog post, I will mention 5 questions we need to pose to ourselves and meditate upon when it comes to evaluating whether Christianity is true or false.
 Question 1: If I Knew Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Christianity Were True, Would I Follow Christ?

Yes.  But that answer means nothing useful, since I might decide that the Christianity that is "true" is Marcion's gospel, which said the OT YHWH was a demon.  So my ability to be objective and answer your question "yes" doesn't really accomplish much in your eyes unless I get lucky enough to pick the particular set of beliefs YOU say are essential to salvation.

The first thing you need to decide is whether or not if Christianity were demonstrated to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, you'd become one of Christ's followers. If you knew God existed, would you worship Him?

No.  that would be about as dumb as a lower life form worshipping YOU merely because you are in fact, a higher life form.  Well your being a higher life form doesn't automatically imply that anything you do is morally good or realistic. 

Would you try to live the life that God wants you to live?

Not if you are talking about the god of the OT.  No, I wouldn't go around killing children even if I was convinced the bible-god was telling me to do it for the sake of his mysteriously good reasons.  I'd instead tell him to fuck off, just like I'd tell any enemy that is more powerful than I, to fuck off.

Furthermore I don't see any reason to give a fuck about obeying God, given that the arguments for literal conscious eternal torment are themselves unbiblical and contradict the type of justice the bible says God requires.  So disobeying god would only result in me dying and going out of existence, something I already believe will happen and have no fear of.

Would you give up anything in your life that He considers sin?

Jesus told his followers that giving up custody of their kids would cause material and spiritual abundance to flow into their lives (Matthew 19:29), but you are crazy if you think I'd follow that kind of advice 2,000 years after the fact.

If you hesitate or if your answer is no, then your problem is not with regards to the strength of the evidence for Christianity or lack thereof, your problem is either emotional or moral.

That's right.  Your God threatened to cause men to rape women (Isaiah 13:15-17), and like you, I consider rape to be without rational justification, so whoever causes rape is IMO best avoided or killed.

In other words, you simply don't want Christianity to be true.

If you mean I don't want to serve a god that inflicts rape and torture on children, then yes, like you, I cannot imagine myself ever giving in to the whims of such sadistic lunacy.

If Christianity were true, then you would have to repent or else face judgment.

Correction:  if the Christianity YOU believe is the right form, were true, then we'd have to repent or else face judgment.  But as far as I can tell, the Christianity of the NT contradicts the OT god's standard of justice and is not consistent about the nature of hell, so once again, I don't see the danger in telling your pedophile savior Christ to fuck off.  It apparently involves as much danger as giving the bird to the driver who cuts me off in traffic.  Let's just say I'm not exactly fearful of the wrath of an obviously fictitious god.

Rather than live life in open rebellion against God knowing that Hell awaits, they comfort themselves by talking themselves into believing that The Bible is nothing but a book a fairy tales.

But hell is contrary to the OT god's standard of justice.  So it's reasonable for me to react to the contradiction by viewing the OT as the golden standard.  Therefore eternal hell does NOT await.  Only physical death and extinction of consciousness...something I already accept without fear.

It's much easier to live your life in sin if you can convince yourself that there isn't someone who's going to hold you accountable beyond the grave.

If you intended to talk to stupid shit juvenile delinquents, then i guess you had a point.  But most of your readers aren't that depraved, so your characterizing them as living in sin is questionable at best and insulting at worst.  If you are so fanatical that you think I'm "sinning" by going to work everyday, guying groceries, paying the bills, and doing the daily routine most other Americans do, then i'm afraid your fanaticism puts you beyond any possibility of reasoning with.  You might not say its good to play with live rattlesnakes in church, but your bigotry and closed-mindedness are still as intense as it is for those fools.

If Christianity is true, then several implications follow.

But only after you've reasonably decided which denomination is true.  You aren't going to do that...not with evangelicals themselves being in so much disagreement they've been fighting each other for years over every biblical thing except perhaps Jesus' gender.

It means that if you're living in sin, you'll have to repent.

I'm not living in sin.  Sin presupposes god's existence.  God doesn't exist, for the same reason that bwickfullmers don't gofleding.  "God" is an incoherent concept.

Jesus said that if you even look at a woman with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart (Matthew 5:28), and adultery is one of the things God said not to do (Exodus 20:14).

But Jesus' refusal to insist on the death penalty for any man who lusts after a woman, indicates his disagreement with Moses.  You will say Jesus is God and can modify his law at will, but I say the prohibition on adultery is something Frank Turek would say emanates from God's morally good "nature", and therefore God can no more allow exceptions to his mandated justice, than you can choose to levitate yourself over a traffic jam.

If you like to spend your evenings downloading and looking at pornography, you'll have to get that out of your life or answer to God for it (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Or we can blame God, who, like the parent guilty of child neglect, has the power to make us do whatever he wants (Ezra 1:1, and Cyrus was a pagan idolater whose sins were therefore far worse than merely gazing at nude women), but who chooses to avoid employing that magic fairy dust. 

But porn watchers don't want to do that. Watching porn is fun! It's exciting! Porn watchers don't want to give up porn because they enjoy it too much.

If God didn't want me to watch porn, he'd use his Ezra 1:1 magic fairy dust to convince me otherwise.  If that crap works on pagan idolaters like Cyrus, well, I don't fuck animals or burn children alive, so if your god has a method of convincing that works on sinners far worse than myself, your god is a dumb fuck and therefore less likely a higher life form and more likely a fiction or lower life form.

Others may want to sleep around, bouncing from woman to woman. According to Hebrews 13:4, this is a no-no. If someone engaged in this behavior doesn't repent, they'll be facing judgment.

But the OT doesn't condemn the single guy who has sex with a non-virgin woman, and since you aren't allowed to add to the word of the Lord, (Deut. 4:12), that type of activity cannot be called sin.  See Romans 7:7 if you think you could have discovered coveting was sin without seeing it condemned in the Law.

Romans 1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and 1 Timothy 1:9-11 prohibit homosexual relationships. Some people don't want Christianity to be true because it means they'll have to stop having sex with their same-sex partner.

Agreed, but i'm not homosexual, so, dismissed.  But you might wish to send those verses to James Patrick Holding. He is a closet homosexual or else was before I started telling the world the evidence for it, as abundantly documented at this blog.

2 Corinthians 6:14 prohibits a believer marrying an unbeliever. Some people may not want Christianity to be true because they know that if it is, they need to become Christians or else they face Hell, and if they're Christians themselves, they'll be prohibited from marrying their boyfriend or girlfriend who is also an unbeliever.

You are assuming Christianity's truth involves apostle Paul.  I say Paul was a heretic and liar, so Paul's legalistic bullshit wouldn't really bother me.  I'd become a follower of Christ, not a follower of his dishonest followers.

For many people, it's a purely intellectual issue. Merely being presented with the evidence for Christianity, as I've done in several posts on this blog and as I've done in my books, will be sufficient to persuade them to become Christians. For others, they will talk themselves out of any argument, no matter how compelling it otherwise would be. They have to. Their autonomy is at stake.

Not according to 5 point Calvinists.  According to them, we resist the gospel because God infallibly decreed that we resist the gospel.  Then God judges us with pain and punishment for doing exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, where he wanted, how he wanted, while he was pulling our puppet strings in those directions the whole time.

This is why the Christian Apologist and Oxford mathematician John Lennox said: "If religion is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark, then atheism is a fairy tale for those afraid of the light."

Cute talking point.  Dismissed.

1 Lennox was echoing the words of Jesus; "This is the verdict; that light has come into the world, but people loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will come nowhere near the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20).

And what would you think of an atheist who says "everyone who resists atheism is resisting correct knowledge"?  If sound bytes don't convince you, how can you expect sound bytes to convince us?

Ask yourself, am I suppressing the truth in my unrighteousness?

No, in fact you and most other apologists studiously avoid debating me despite the fact that I always argue on the merits.  Maybe you should ask yourself the same question.  You deal with me, and you start giving your readers less reasons to donate money to your word-wrangling ventures. 

Is my love of sin overriding my love for finding the truth?

No, I have extensively reviewed and meticulously falsified the dogshit put out by Habermas, Craig and Licona.

Do I love truth when it enlightens me, but hate it when it convicts me?

Maybe.  So what?  You are a sinner, your Christianity does nothing to make you more welcoming of uncomfortable truth, as evidenced by the obvious fact that you refuse to debate me.  I've said too much and debated too often for you to pretend that I'm just too ignorant.  Your motive to avoid debating me is your fear that actual truth might be different than what you've chosen to make money with.

Love of sin is not the only non-intellectual "reason" you might have for rejecting Christ. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin,3 you know that if Christianity is true, someone you loved who died as a non-believer is in Hell. If you can convince yourself there is no God and there is no Hell, you don't need to walk around with that uncomfortable thought. But, our feelings do not determine truth. How you feel about Christian doctrine is irrelevant to whether or not it's true.

But not irrelevant to whether I have rational warrant for rejecting your religion.  And yes, I've already decided that rape cannot be morally justified, so I am smart and wise to say "fuck you" to any notion of a higher life form that threatens women with rape, such as your God (Isaiah 13:15-17, Deut. 28:30).

Question 2: What Evidence Would I Expect There To Be If Christianity Is True and Is This Expectation Reasonable?
 The second question you need to ask yourself is how what kind of evidence you would expect to find if Christianity were true? What kind of evidence are you looking for that would lead you to say there is or is not any evidence?

What kind of evidence would convince you that space aliens control your thoughts from another dimension?

For me, a universe with an ex nihilo beginning that is impeccably fine-tuned to permit life to exist on both the cosmic and local levels,

The universe did not have a beginning, see 1st law of thermodynamics (matter cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed).

The Big Bang and you and Turek depend so heavily on, is considered unbiblical, unscientific, and a lie of the devil by multiple creationist Christian organizations like AiG and ICR.

Life is nothing but the natural result of the circumstances.  Gazing in wild wonder at life on earth is about as smart as gazing in wild wonder that mold grows in damp attics, or that a cup holds water.

the existence of the moral law,

Sorry, there are no objective or absolute morals.  You aren't meeting your burden by simply blurting out "thou shalt not torture babies to death solely for entertainment" and then pretending the debate is foreclosed thereby.  You are forgetting that there is a very good but purely naturalistic reason most people find baby torture immoral, and you would be forgetting that your own god tortured at least one baby for 7 days before allowing it to die (2nd Samuel 12:15-18).  All of the atrocities you think are absolutely immoral, are caused by God, including parental cannibalism and murder (Deut. 28:15-63, 32:39).

the modal possibility of the existence of a Maximally Great Being,

your worship of Anselm is truly revolting, since, like the term "god" itself, "maximally great being" is also incoherent, as "greatness" is horrifically subjective. 

and five historical facts about Jesus' death and what happened afterward and the fact that only the resurrection can account for all five of those facts is exactly what I would expect if Christianity were true.

You were already schooled by me on why those five facts do not place any intellectual compulsion on the skeptic, but you chose to let me have the final word, and you walked away from that debate.

If Christianity were false, the universe should have always existed,

Good call.  it has.

the possibility of biological life should be way more probable,

It is.  If another planet formed the way earth did, similarly near to its home star, there is no reason to think life wouldn't eventually form.

we should have no moral law written on our hearts,

We don't.  According to your bible, those morals come from a stick.  See Proverbs 22:15.

a Maximally Great Great Being should be conceptually incoherent,

it is.  What's greater, a god who can play guitar as fast as Paul Gilbert, or a god who has decided to avoid learning how to play the guitar?  Or did you forget that Paul prohibited you from word-wrangling?

and Jesus' tomb should have remained occupied with all of his disciples moving on with their lives as they did before they even met Jesus.

No, you need to surf youtube if you think religion cannot cause people to believe crazy shit upon little or no evidence.  And the evidence for the empty tomb is laughable.

But we don't live in that kind of world. 4
 However, that's just me. What kind of evidence are you looking for?

Can it be reasonable for me to arrive at that time in my life when I think I don't need to examine Mormon claims anymore, and to therefore draw a skeptical conclusion about it's ultimate nature? 

Then it can also be reasonable for me to consider that I've done enough study of the bible to justify drawing a skeptical conclusion about its ultimate nature.  You don't know where to draw that line, so you'll pardon me if I draw it for myself.

If you say "there's no evidence", you must either have not encountered the aforementioned evidence or else they don't fit your definition of evidence.

There's plenty of evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.  But it is so horrifically lacking in plausibility and authentication that it isn't worthy of credence.

Moreover, is what kind of evidence you're looking for reasonable to expect if the Christian worldview is true?

Christianity is too convoluted and contradictory to predict what kind of evidence should be showing itself if the religion were true.  What kind of evidence would you expect if "aliens control my thoughts from another dimension" were true?

Perhaps your epistemology is too restrictive. There are those who hold to a view called Scientism. This view asserts that the only truth that can be known is what can be tested by science.

That's true.  The more you push data that can be seen and heard, the more you testify, even if unwittingly to the stupidity of being open to messages from aliens living in other dimensions.

If this view is true, then supernatural entities like God, angels, demons, souls, et. al. cannot be known since they cannot be tested by science.

Sure, there might be truth out there science cannot currently detect, but if that's the case, YOU wouldn't know about it either, because you don't provide any justification to think you are some special person with special powers to peer into the unknown.

Although, I do think that science can provide evidence in a premise in a philosophical argument for God's existence (e.g The Kalam's premise that "The universe began to exist").

The universe didn't begin to exist.  Try again.

If scientism is your epistemology, then it's no wonder why you aren't convinced by philosophical arguments for God's existence or the historical evidence for Jesus' divine self-understanding and resurrection from the dead. This is because philosophy and history aren't scientific enterprises. Science is great and it has provided us with much knowledge of our world over the past several centuries. However, it is fallacious to say that science is the only path towards truth. Think about it. Can the statement "Only science can provide knowledge" subject to scientific testing?

It doesn't need to be.  There are such things as axioms, which are beyond "testing".

Can you put the claim "Only what science can establish as true is true" underneath a microscope or a super collider? No!

But science isn't limited to what can be seen through a microscope or supercollider.  you are also doing scientific testing when you compare what somebody says about themselves, with their known pattern of behavior.  It's all induction.

These are philosophical statements not subject to scientific testing. Since they cannot be verified through science, and only that which can be verified through science can be known, then the epistemology of scientism cannot be known! Scientism is self-refuting. It collapses under its own criterion.

Sounds like you love the sin of word-wrangling.

Question 3: Am I Setting Too High Of A Standard Of Proof? How much evidence is enough evidence?

You cannot know, therefore, you cannot condemn those who decide for themselves when enough is enough.

You need to reflect on whether or not you're setting the bar too high.

The Holy Spirit needs to get off his ass now that he knows his sinners cannot do his job for him.  You will say arguments can never take the place of the work of the Holy Spirit in convicting a person of sin, but pretending your arguments can never do the job of full convincing merely turns the Holy Spirit into a gratuitous afterthought.  Can you imagine a lawyer or criminal investigator making his best empirical case, then telling the jury "empirical arguments cannot convince, only the Holy Spirit can convince"?

Are you a skeptic or a hyper-skeptic? What's the difference?

Nothing but rhetoric, sort of like you christians who constantly recharacterize consistent 5 Point Calvinists as "hyper-Calvinists".  No, they are just consistent, that's all.

I'll never forget a Facebook post my friend Luke Nix made several years ago. He said, "Hyper-Skepticism is having to drink an entire carton of milk before concluding that the milk is bad and should have been thrown out after the first sip."

And regular skepticism says if the first taste of milk is sour, you are a fool to think that if you keep drinking it, the sour will go away.  Well excuse me, but I've already tasted Christianity and found it rotten.  There is no intellectual compulsion on me to continually worry that maybe it was just my taste buds that deceived me into thinking the milk was bad. You Christians cannot even figure out what types of theology-milk are bad.

The fact is that the vast majority of the conclusions we reach, even in our daily lives, are based on probability, not absolute certainty.

Correct.

I don't even have 100% certainty that I'm sitting at my desk right now typing up this blog post. It's possible that I'm just a brain in a vat of chemicals with electrodes hooked up to my brain, and there's a scientist sending stimulates into my brain to make me experience the sensation of sitting at my desk, typing up a blog post. There is a possibility that that is the case, but that possibility is so unfathomably tiny that I don't give such a scenario any serious consideration. I am 99% certain that I am not a brain in a vat, but I still can't get up to 100% certainty.

Good point.

If you can't believe with 100% certainty that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals, yet you still give mental assent to the claim that the external world is real, why wouldn't you give mental assent to the truth claims of Christianity?

Because, as i demonstrate over and over, Christianity's best apologists fail miserably to show their supernatural hypothesis of Jesus' resurrection is better than a naturalistic hypothesis.  It doesn't really take a degree in philosophy to recognize that reasonable doubt materializes where the experts fail to make their case.

J. Warner Wallace wrote that "In legal terms, the line that must be crossed before someone can come to the conclusion that something is evidentially true is called the 'standard of proof” (the 'SOP'). The SOP varies depending on the kind of case under consideration. The most rigorous of these criteria is the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard that is required at criminal trials. But how do we know when we have crossed the line and are 'beyond a reasonable doubt'? The courts have considered this important issue and have provided us with a definition:
 'Reasonable doubt is defined as follows: It is not a mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of the jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge.'
 This definition is important because it recognizes the difference between reasonable and possible that we discussed earlier. There are, according to the ruling of the court, 'reasonable doubts,' 'possible doubts,' and 'imaginary doubts.' The definition acknowledges something important: every case has unanswered questions that will cause jurors to wonder. All the jurors will have doubts as they come to a decision. We will never remove every possible uncertainty; that’s why the standard is not 'beyond any doubt.' Being 'beyond a reasonable doubt' simply requires us to separate our possible and imaginary doubts from those that are reasonable."5

I'm sorry to hear that you too give in the stupid "legal apologetic".  You have to be horrifically ignorant of court rules and case law if you think the gospels would pass authentication tests demanded by modern American courts.

Question 4: I Find Theological Position X Unreasonable. Is This A Central Tenet Of Christianity or Is This Debated Within The Church? Can I Be A Christian and Still Reject X?
 Just can't bring yourself to believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old?

No.  Neither can conservative Christian apologist and creationist Hugh Ross and many other creationists, to say nothing of the consensus of non-Christian geologists.

Don't believe a good God would causally determine people to sin?

Is causing another person to sin, objectively immoral, or do you have to first inquire as to who is doing the causing?  Why would you have to first ask who is doing the causing?  Might it be that yes, the bible claims your god causes people to sin, and that is the ONLY reason you don't immediately condemn the causing of sin?

Don't think a just God would leave people in eternal conscious torment?

No, not when he can get rid of sin by arbitrarily declaring it removed (2nd Samuel 12:13).

It's possible that these seem unreasonable because they are unreasonable. And guess what? Many Christians would agree with you. Not every position you find a Christian defending is central to the Christian worldview. Some are. You can't be a Christian and not believe that God exists, that God is one being who consists of three persons (The Doctrine Of The Trinity),

Sorry, but nowhere does the NT express or imply that confession of the Trinity is essential to salvation or to being "Christian". 

that we're sinners in need of salvation,

Jesus doesn't seem to do a whole lot of informing his Gentile followers that they need salvation.  Does god do a healing miracle for a Gentile and then just say nothing about her need to repent?

and that Jesus died on the cross and bodily rose from the dead.

Jesus obviously taught the true gospel before he died and rose from the dead, so the original gospel did not demand that people believe he died and rose from the dead.  If you think things changed since he died, that's your problem.

However, other issues are debatable, such as how to interpret Genesis 1, whether humans have free will or whether God causally determines all things, and whether or not God lets human experience eternal conscious torment or whether God annihilates the condemned from existence (a view known as Annihilationism).
 Don't reject Christianity simply because you find some secondary doctrine unreasonable. I myself find two of the three secondary issues mentioned above unreasonable. That's why I'm an Evolutionary Creationist and a Molinist rather than a Young Earth Creationist and a Calvinist.

Or maybe we can be reasonable to reject Christianity because its apologists appear eager in their effort to commit the sin or word-wrangling, and encourage their readers to do the same by pretending that the word-wrangling that goes on between Christians on the subject of evolution, creation, Molinism, Old earth creationism and Calvinism are useful and lead to the edification of the hearers.  I suggest you read 2nd Timothy 2:14, ALL of it.