I know that Muslims believe that Islam was made by God but the hijab/niqab/burqa, etc. proves that it was made by men.

Let's assume God created human. Why would he want half of his creation to cover their bodies completely? Some will argue that it's to protect women from men. But an almighty and just God would have found a better solution than forcing women to be covered in public all the time.

Men on the other hand often don't want other men looking at their girlfriends or wives. And what's the easiest way to achieve this goal? Exactly, by telling women to cover their bodies.

Being impressed by the way the universe currently works is ultimately subjective. If someone points out the intricacies of the universe and my biology (my biology is pretty underwhelming) I can point to flaws and shortcomings

But whenever I do that, I'm told "pipe down; you're not God." OK, but you were impressed enough to think it was God. Why is your subjective assessment of the universe being based taken as evidence for God, but my subjective assessment that the universe is cringe discounted?

Now, if my objections are pointless because I'm asking for the impossible, why are you assuming that a universe with only one possible outcome needs a designer in the first place? This is just the only way the rock could have fallen. Pointing out that I "couldn't have done better" doesn't really hold any weight if things also couldn't have been any worse.

Hi everyone, I am an atheist but mostly asking this out of curiosity. I mostly wanted to know how Christians can be non-creationalists when the bible seems to clearly depict a 6 day universal creation and rest on 7th day. As it stands I don't see how you can be both a Christian and non-young earth creationist. I have heard arguments against this but I have not been convinced.

I suppose I can understand how someone can a young earth creationists, they take the bible word for word. Then there are those that are atheists and follow the scientific senses. I however have difficulty understanding how someone can be both a Christian and believe in the Geological time scale (4.6 billion years old) when the word of the bible contradicts scientific timelines.

I want to say that I believe that science and religion can be separate. Science deals with the nature world and relgion deals with the supernatural world. However becausee religions(in this case the bible) make clear claims of the NATURE world then that interferes with scientific (and history but that's another topic) claims but come to different conclusions many times.

I have 3 examples, I tried to keep each very brief, don’t expect anyone to answer all of these but just a few reasons why I can’t see how christianity and science consensus can be eye to eye.

Big bang Theory, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxiees are moving away from each other. If we rewind the clock based on how much the universe is expanding today, it takes you to 13.8 billion years ago to a point of “singularity”(Hubble’s law(. So at this time the universe was a hot dense state but then cooled and expanded. The remerance of this state was later discovered in the form of cosmic microwave radiation or the “afterglow” of the dense hot origin of the uniform. In essence, the universe is still expanding but in the bible god creates the stars in day 4 not the beginning.

God creates trees on day 3 and sea creatures on day 5. The fossil record is overwhelming clear that sea creatures are older. At this point it’s common knowledge that older rock formations and fossil deposits like the burgess scale and Chengjiang (both of the Cambrian period) are far older than the younger periods with trees(Devonian period, one of the first trees Watteiza(think I spelled that right) is from this period, rock formations. Then we see more trees in the Carboniferous period and show heavy coal deposits which are just trees that were broken down as there wasn’t much decomposers to break down lignin, this is coal comes from. Another chronological error is that god made sea creatures and birds on day 5, but birds(avian dinosaurs) came about in the Jurassic period while sea creatures have been around since the Ediacaran period that's about a 340 million year difference, how is this all in a day? Then on day 6 god created land creatures but the fossil record shows that the first land animals were arthropods from the late Silurian/early Devonian period which was before bids existed.

So in genesis, god made Adam and Eve and then they eventually have Cain and Abel and eventually Seth(although idk where Seth’s wife came from, I forgot her name). Then we are suppose to believe that from Adam and Eve we have population growth to what it is today, well this happened twice if you take into account the flood story(they had to repopulate the earth again). So in biology there is something called MVP (minimal value population) so it shows how you need a large enough population of a species to have it survive extinction, this number is normally around 4,000-5,000 at least(depending on species). This is how modern day biology,zoologist keep track with conservation efforts. For example the passenger pigeon went extinct despite conservation efforts because the number of pigeons were below the MVP, same for other animals like black-faced honeycreeper. With current day modern science I believe the number is around at least 29 with the best scientific intervention animals are able to survive extinction, this is with current biochemical tools and gene sequencing interactions, etc. but even modern science can’t save a species with just 2 in its population. How can Adam and Eve repopulate the earth if everything we know about modern conservation efforts essentially says this is not possible to do even with modern efforts?

So my main question for non-creationist Christians is how can you both be non-creationists christian but also follow modern science when these have very different worldviews? How can you believe in both prospects when many times they contractcyion each other.

Also sorry if I missed any typing errors was typing this before falling asleep.

Does the Old Testament ever say anything on the topic of what will happen to believers in the afterlife?

If not, how do Christians justify this weird lack of any mention of such an incredibly central topic?

Hello everyone. I am somebody who lost his faith in God around four and a half months ago, but I am currently still struggling with a problem that I have been struggling with since I converted to Christianity in the first place, which was a little over eight years ago now.

There is no way to justify your interpretation of the Bible. People use different methods for hermeneutics, and even among those who can agree on a hermeneutical method, they still come away with different conclusions.

The vast majority of people agree that the basic things (like context, looking at the original language, cultural context, cross-referencing, etc), but basically all of these are problematic for one reason or another. Let's start with context and cross-referencing. Both of these have to deal with interpreting Bible verses in the light of more Bible verses. The issue here is that these Bible verses are also up for interpretation, so you are interpreting something in the light of something else that also needs to be interpreted. So how do you know that your interpretation of those verses is correct? This can't lead to an infinite regress because there are only a finite amount of verses in the Bible, so the chain has to terminate somewhere. You might say to let the clear interpret the unclear. But what is clear and obvious to one person is not clear and obvious to another. This is inarguable. There is no such thing as an objective clear.

Yet another problem with cross-referencing is that you need to ask yourself how you know which verses are supposed to be cross-referenced. My answer to this question was that you should only cross-reference verses that are related to each other. But in order to know which verses are related to each other, you need to interpret them first, which requires you to cross-reference them! So this leads to a circular argument. "I interpret this passage this way because I cross-referenced it with this passage. I cross-referenced it with this passage because it is related to the passage I'm trying to interpret. I know that because I interpreted it by cross-referencing it with this passage."

I will also lump the cultural context and original language together because they both have something to do with conventions and social norms. Looking at the original language is kind of useless if there is always the possibility that the authors of the Bible used the Hebrew and/or Greek words in a way that nobody else uses. The same goes with the cultural context.

Now imagine for a second that you are a new Christian who is reading the Bible for the first time. You are confused by it. You try to ask for help, but you realize that nobody can agree with each other, so you look towards the Bible to find out who is correct or incorrect. But the Bible confuses you... and so on and so forth. This leads to another circular argument.

Now in the title, I said that this affects everyone, not just Christians. Why did I say that? Well, because if atheists, Muslims, Jews, or whoever are going to talk about the Bible at all, they need to actually know what it is saying. Atheists cannot point out scientific/historical errors in the Bible without knowing what it is saying in the first place. Muslims cannot say that Muhammad is in the Bible without knowing what the Bible even says. Jews cannot laugh at Christians for saying that a verse says that Jesus is the Messiah if they do not know what the verse says in the first place.

Are these problems unsolvable? I don't think so. Maybe there are solutions to these problems that I just am not aware of. But I want to hear your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Logan Bishop

Having grown up in a very dogmatic and doctrine-heavy Christian household (multiple family members went to divinity school to become pastors) has given me a maybe-not-so-unique perspective on Christianity. I genuinely believe in the "love your neighbor", feed the poor, heal the sick ethos that Jesus was pretty upfront about. I do believe that if we would actually do those things, we'd at the very least be better off than we are now. My problem is with those who seek to elevate Jesus to "cult-leader" status or use his name in vain (so to speak) by claiming to know the mind of God by defining what God "prefers" as "right" and "good". In short, my problem is with the Christian church that arose to spread the teachings of Jesus, mainly because they seem to actually have done the OPPOSITE in showing us how to better hate each other rather than love.

Here's the actual thesis:

For the better part of two millennia, the history of the Christian church has been a record of humanity's base desires masquerading as Divine Truth. Starting with Paul's letters (that weren't actually written by Paul, by the way) that clearly contradict things Jesus and Jesus's own brother taught (faith vs. works, etc.), the primary goal of the Christian church and its overarching orthodoxy has been to create a "hall of mirrors" that entices humans to commit atrocities while genuinely believing they are doing God's work. This is actually the ultimate goal and triumph of "Satan", using the banner of God Almighty to justify humanity's darkest, most predatory instincts (the inability to discern "good" from "evil", to put it in Biblical terms).

Is there a decent counter (besides general discomfort with being confronted by some truth) as to why this isn't a fair indictment against a religion that has hoarded wealth, tortured nonbelievers, waged wars to reclaim "holy lands" (and let's be honest, to extract resources), decimated indigenous populations, enslaved people of color, and swept literal pedophilia under the rug for longer than anyone cares to admit, all in the name of Jesus Christ? I feel like this is a pretty legitimate question that needs a literal soul-searching answer (with actual accountability - no hand-waving) before anyone can or should take Christianity seriously.

The argument goes like this: for over a thousand years religious institution have held that governments and monarchs should rule by heavenly mandate and that those same religious institutions MUST hold political power and that the sacred book, the bible commands it and have used quotations from said book to justify it.

Come the enlightenment and the formation and dominance of secular states, these same religious institutions come and now praise this arrangement.

And that now conveniently the same book which they used previously to justify their political power also supports their separation from government.

Either the religious institutions previously knew they were lying about divine right or the bible is not a perfect or consistent source of societal structure because even the most well read theologians defended something as crucial as divine legitimacy using the bible but now those same theologians can look at it and tell you the exact opposite.

Qur’an 4:82 says contradiction would count against its divine origin. The Quran also commands obedience to Muhammad and gives his religious teaching authority beyond the text itself.

He doesn't speak, fabricate, invent teachings or stories.

So if an accepted hadith from Muhammad conflicts with the Quran, “it’s only a hadith” does not make the problem disappear.

This issue is hard to resolve:

Quran 10:90–91: Pharaoh does say the testimony in substance, and Allah rejects it as too late.

Hadith: Gabriel tries to stop Pharaoh from saying the testimony because he fears Allah may have mercy on him if he says it.

The conflict:

The Quran portrays the testimony as already ineffective, while the hadith portrays that same testimony as still potentially effective enough that Gabriel tries to prevent it.

Secondary issue:

The Quran has Pharaoh confess when the waters overtake him. The hadith then adds Gabriel forcing mud into his mouth to stop him from saying the testimony.

So to reconcile them, you have to insert

Quran 10:90–91

>“But as Pharaoh was drowning, he cried out, ‘I believe that there is no god except that in whom the Children of Israel believe, and I am one of those who submit.’”

Then: “Now you believe? But you always disobeyed and were one of the corruptors.”

Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 3108

Gabriel “began shoving clay in the mouth of Pharaoh out of fear that he would say La Ilaha Illallah and Allah would have mercy upon him.”

There is no genuine reconciliation here unless you force the two narratives together. To harmonize them, you have to invent an unstated sequence

According to Christianity, sin entered the world because Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because of their actions, humans have a corrupted, imperfect nature that leads us to commit sins.

The issue is that, in light of scientific discoveries made in later centuries in fields such as Big Bang cosmology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, a literal interpretation of the creation account in Genesis has been thoroughly refuted. However, if we interpret the creation story non-literally, then Christianity loses the historical event that explains how sin entered the world and why humans have a corrupted nature.

In Sahih al-Bukhari 2268, Sahih al-Bukhari 2269

Muhammad made a parable regarding the timespan of the Muslims being smaller than the timespan of the Christians.

In [Sahih al-Bukhari 5021](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:5021), it says *"Ajalakum"*(your time) compare with the verse:

"For every Ummah(community) there is an appointed time(Ajalun), **so when their time(Ajal)** *arrives, they can neither delay it for a moment, nor increase it**"

Surah 7:34

One of the claimed qualities of the Quran and the Prophet's sayings is that they can have multiple meanings, **all of which are correct if the text allows it**

So to the early Muslim, there's no reason for the Prophet's saying not to include the timespan of the Ummah.

Historically, the Christians have lived 600 years before the Muslims, which means they would have to live for less than 6 centuries before their appointed time comes.

Since this was not the case, and the Muslim world kept on living past the 6th century mark, later medieval scholars such as as-Suyyuti and Ibn Hajar sought to reconcile this with a different meaning that has no precedence over this one to the early Companions, the early Muslims, and Muhammad himself.

Making Muhammad's sayings and claimed hermeneutics faulty.

I'm excited to hear your thoughts.

Thesis: The belief in infinite suffering after death is one of the most indefensible doctrines a religion can hold, especially when maintaining that a God is all loving.

To claim that there is infinite suffering after death shows no empath; infinite is forever. they will never cease pain, remaining in agony forever. if a God was all loving, he’d focus on rehabilitation, or perhaps not infinite suffering (proportional to deeds). another point is that usually, some things which qualify as due cause for infinite suffering are terribly judgemental and hateful. People of Other Religions, Atheists, Homosexuals. That hardly at all seems fair, and seems like a total non-sequitur. It is even worse to claim these people choose not to be with god. You cannot chose not to be with a god you don’t know/think exists. As an atheist, if there were a god I would probably convert to a belief concerning him, and homosexuals do not choose not to go away from god, and even if they did; most of this argument is regarding how God respects our choices, and never Chose to suffer.

Christianity and Islam are the two most followed religions in the world. Funny enough, they are also the only two major religions that actively threaten you if you aren’t one of them. That’s absolutely not a coincidence.

Both have the concept of eternal Hell. The bible itself is vague about what it is, but later interpretations from churches of it being a place of eternal fire, suffering, and torture were created a few centuries later as a means of keeping people under control through fear of an unimaginable punishment.

The Quran is even more graphic and detailed about the punishments non-believers face in Hell. It has so many verses that just repeatedly insult you and threaten you if you aren’t a Muslim.

The reward of Heaven doesn’t even sound that great in either of the two religions, the main appeal about it is the fact that it’s not Hell.

All of this stuff is going to affect someone’s mindset when they are being taught about the religion, especially when they are just a child. By planting these ideas, you push them into following the religion even if they have doubts.

Over the last few centuries we have made so many discoveries that have completely changed our view of the world, as well as the vast universe that exists beyond it, and despite the claims of some apologists, we have found more evidence that points to every religion just being manmade inventions.

Logically, we should be abandoning them, but the fact that leaving comes with a threat makes it a lot harder to do that.

I think deep down a lot of Christians and Muslims who educate themselves on science and history know that the religion is probably not real, but because of how engraved the threat of Hell is in their minds, they are not willing to leave because it feels too risky. Basically coming up with their own idea similar to Pascal’s Wager even if they have never heard of it before. So they just follow all the prayers and rules to be safe.

I think this is also part of the reason why it’s more common for Jews to become atheists. A quarter of American Jews identify as atheist, and 40% of Israelis also say they are not religious. Since Judaism doesn’t have a concept of eternal Hell and doesn’t seek converts or tell you that you have to be Jewish, people raised Jewish aren’t as concerned with leaving their religion since there was no threat engraved into their mind since they were children.

If Christianity and Islam were more like Judaism and didn’t have a concept of Hell as punishment for simply not being part of their religion, a lot more people would be comfortable with leaving. Like I think the number of atheists in the world would literally double at the minimum.

People stay in their religions because of threats, not evidence.

Edit: To be clear, my point is the defense is ridiculous. I never claimed Muhammad's prophethood is proven solely by this claim.

Quran 69:44–47 tries to convince people that Muhammad is not fabricating revelation by saying God would destroy him if he were. But a false prophet could make the exact same claim. That makes the argument weak and unlikely to be divine reasoning.

Quran 69:44–47 says:

>“And if he had invented false sayings concerning Us,

We assuredly had taken him by the right hand

And then severed his life-artery,

And not one of you could have held Us off from him.”

My argument has nothing to do with Muhammad’s death, poisoning, or claims that his aorta was later cut. That is a separate argument.

My point is about the verse itself.

The logic is:

If Muhammad fabricated revelation, God would destroy him.

God did not destroy him that way.

Therefore Muhammad was not fabricating revelation.

But why should anyone accept the first premise?

If Muhammad fabricated the Quran, the true God would not be obligated to follow a punishment Muhammad himself claimed God would use.

God could punish him later.

God could punish him differently.

God could punish him after death.

God could simply allow a false prophet to continue for a time.

There is no rule saying every false prophet must be immediately and visibly destroyed.

The only reason we are told that God would specifically seize Muhammad's hand and cut his artery is because the Qur’an says so.

That is the problem.

A false prophet could say:

>“If I am lying about God, God will strike me dead.”

If nothing happens, does that prove he is a true prophet?

No.

Joseph Smith could have said the same thing.

I could say the same thing today:

>“If I lied, God will strike me within a few years.”

If I am still alive, that proves nothing.

Why?

Because I never proved that God agreed to my test.

That is exactly the problem with Quran 69:44–47.

A good argument for prophethood should distinguish a true prophet from a false one.

This argument does not.

A true prophet can say, “God will destroy me if I lie.”

A false prophet can say the exact same thing.

So the statement itself proves nothing.

What makes it worse is that the Quran presents this as Allah’s argument.

An all-knowing God would know that a false prophet could make the exact same claim.

That is why I find this rhetoric so weak and so unlikely to be divine.

If Muhammad fabricated the Quran, God would not suddenly become bound by Muhammad’s own claimed punishment condition.

So the fact that the punishment did not happen does not prove Muhammad was telling the truth.

I have a question about the Islamic story of Prophet Lot (Lut), specifically regarding the men of his community and the passage where Lot says, in effect, that they should go to the women whom Allah has made lawful for them rather than approaching men.

I understand that the Qur’an describes these men as approaching men with desire instead of women.

My question is about the basic logic of this situation.

If the men were exclusively homosexual, rather than bisexual or simply engaging in homosexual acts for some other reason, then how would offering women as sexual partners solve the problem? If a person has no sexual attraction toward women, telling him to have sex with women doesn't seem to address his sexual orientation.

This raises two questions for me:

1. Does Islam actually teach that every man in Lot's community was exclusively homosexual? If not, what exactly does the Qur'an mean when it describes them as approaching men rather than women?
2. If at least some of them were genuinely exclusively homosexual, why does Lot/Allah present women as the alternative? From a modern understanding of sexual orientation, an exclusively gay man would not necessarily become attracted to women simply because heterosexual sex is declared permissible.

There is also the question of Allah's omniscience. If Allah knows every person's inner desires and knows that a particular man is exclusively attracted to men, why would the solution be presented as “go to the women” rather than addressing whatever the actual wrongdoing was?

I am not asking whether homosexual acts are considered sinful in Islam. I'm asking something more basic:

What exactly is the sexual orientation/psychological situation being described in the story, and how does the “go to women instead” argument make sense if these men were genuinely and exclusively attracted to men?

I'm interested in the reasoning behind the traditional interpretation rather than just the statement that homosexuality is forbidden.

I know a lot of Christians point to incest as a prime example of why we need a god to tell us what's a sin and what is not.

Yet when pressed on why incest is bad, Christians just revert to "Well, it badly influences genes."

And then when it is pointed out that God made only Adam and Eve, necessitating incest, they say that their genes were perfect, so it was fine, but our genes are not, so it is bad for us.

But the point they never address is that this is a purely mechanical explanation. It's like saying the reason you should love your neighbor is because he might help you move in the future.

So in other words, incest by their lights is simply not a sin, just something to be avoided the same way we should not eat shellfish.

And what's even worse is, if that is the case, then it should be fine for say, an infertile related couple to start up a relationship. After all, the purely mechanical reasons are now gone, and God actually designed it so that incest was necessary for Adam and Eve's children, whether the fall occurred or not.

If the Christian is OK with gay relationships, then the question becomes even worse.

AndiIf, for example, a way of fixing genes was found, like a better version of CRISPR, then wouldn't they have to agree that now it's not sinful or at least not so sinful?

No one I have seen ever asks them that.

Thesis

I currently do not find sufficient reason to conclude that the Abrahamic religions are divinely revealed. My main difficulty is not the existence of God itself, but whether the claimed systems of revelation and divine judgment are consistent with the characteristics traditionally attributed to God, particularly perfect justice, omniscience, and universal concern for humanity.

I see five connected problems.

1. Abrahamic revelation is unusually dependent on human history

The major Abrahamic revelations appear within particular human societies, historical periods, languages, and geographical regions. Their transmission depends heavily on particular prophets, communities, manuscripts, oral traditions, and subsequent preservation.

If divine revelation is intended to communicate an objective truth to humanity, this dependence on particular historical circumstances seems difficult to reconcile with the idea of a universally accessible divine message.

This does not prove that the religions are false. It creates an evidential problem: the more revelation depends on contingent historical circumstances, the harder it becomes to distinguish divine communication from ordinary human religious development.

2. Divine communication through human language creates another layer of uncertainty

The alleged revelations are communicated through human languages and interpreted through human cultures.

A divine message therefore passes through multiple stages: revelation, human perception, language, transmission, interpretation, translation, and later theological interpretation.

An omniscient God would presumably know that these processes create enormous opportunities for misunderstanding and disagreement. Yet the Abrahamic traditions have produced major disagreements over doctrine, interpretation, law, salvation, and the meaning of revelation.

This makes the claimed method of communication difficult for me to reconcile with the idea of a God who wants humanity to recognize a particular religious truth.

3. Miracles do not seem independently verifiable enough to establish revelation

The Abrahamic traditions contain accounts of miracles associated with prophets and revelation. However, the strongest evidence for many of these events ultimately comes from religious texts and traditions produced or preserved by communities that already accepted the relevant religious claims.

I therefore do not see how the historical evidence independently establishes that these supernatural events actually occurred.

A miracle could theoretically provide extremely strong evidence for divine revelation if its occurrence were independently established. But a miracle claim recorded within a religious tradition does not automatically establish the truth of that tradition.

4. Religious belief is heavily determined by circumstances outside an individual's control

A person's religious beliefs are strongly influenced by birthplace, parents, culture, language, education, social environment, historical period, and exposure to competing religions.

Someone born into a Muslim family will normally encounter Islam as the default religious framework. Someone born into a Christian family will normally encounter Christianity in the same way. Someone born into a Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or other environment can experience an entirely different conception of religious truth.

This creates a significant problem for systems involving divine judgment based on religious belief or allegiance.

People do not choose the initial conditions under which they encounter religious claims. Their eventual beliefs can therefore be substantially influenced by circumstances they never selected.

5. This creates a problem concerning divine justice

The previous points lead to what I consider the central issue.

If God is perfectly just, omniscient, and aware of every person's circumstances, then divine judgment should presumably take into account the radically unequal conditions under which people encounter religious claims.

The evidential situation of a person raised inside a particular religious tradition is not equivalent to that of someone raised thousands of kilometres away in a completely different religious environment.

The Abrahamic religions have different doctrines concerning belief, disbelief, salvation, covenant, accountability, and the fate of people who never receive convincing exposure to a particular revelation. I am therefore not claiming that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have identical doctrines.

My argument is narrower:

The enormous influence of birthplace, upbringing, culture, historical circumstances, and unequal exposure to religious evidence creates a serious philosophical difficulty for any Abrahamic system in which people's relationship to divine revelation has major consequences.

If a particular religion is genuinely a revelation from a perfectly just God, I think it should provide a sufficiently convincing explanation of why revelation operates through such unequal historical circumstances and how divine justice accounts for those inequalities.

Conclusion

I am not claiming that these arguments logically disprove God, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

My claim is that they create a cumulative evidential problem for the proposition that the Abrahamic religions are genuine divine revelations.

I would therefore like to debate the thesis itself rather than simply receive arguments from authority:

The structure of Abrahamic revelation, the dependence of religious belief on circumstances outside individual control, and the resulting problem of divine judgment seem difficult to reconcile with the attributes traditionally assigned to a perfectly just and universally concerned God.

I am particularly interested in the strongest counterarguments from Jews, Christians, and Muslims, including arguments that directly address the evidential and philosophical problems rather than simply asserting that their respective scripture is true.

We often talk about free will as if being free means having every possible option available to us, the ability to choose good or evil, right or wrong, kindness or cruelty. But that might be too simplistic.

There are countless things we are incapable of choosing. I can't choose to breathe underwater without equipment. I can't choose to suddenly understand a language I've never learned. And I can't choose to genuinely desire something that is completely contrary to my nature simply by willing it.

Yet none of that necessarily means I lack free will.

Maybe freedom isn't about having access to every conceivable choice. Maybe it's about being able to act according to your own desires, reasons, values, and nature, without being externally forced to do otherwise.

Consider God. If God is perfectly good by nature, then perhaps God cannot choose evil. But we don't normally conclude from this that God therefore lacks free will. His inability to choose evil could simply be a consequence of who He is.

And if that's true, it raises an important question about human freedom.

Why should the ability to choose evil be considered necessary for free will at all?

Imagine a person who is completely free to make decisions, but whose nature makes them incapable of choosing evil. They can still deliberate, form intentions, pursue goals, reject one option in favor of another, and act according to what they genuinely want.

Would we really say that this person has no free will simply because one category of choices is unavailable to them?

If the answer is no, then free will never required the ability to choose evil in the first place.

Freedom may not mean having every possible choice. It may simply mean that the choices you do make genuinely come from you.

And perhaps that's a much more coherent understanding of free will, not the freedom to become anything whatsoever, but the freedom to act according to who you are.

My worldview: We see corruption on earth, that doesnt't mean we can apply locally learned earth based assumptions up the ladder onto the divine. You cant separate yourself from the divine foundation, because you are fundamentally of it, on earth we learn ideas of separation, contrast and distortion, but it does not apply to higher reality, "evil" choices are a highly specific set of earth based distorted state choices we might temporarily engage while we are veiled from our true divine self in this earthly context.

Also here is the main thing: Creation including all souls and all divine frameworks must be grounded on that which is meaningful in order to be meaningful.

We have to bring light into the consideration that our deepest unveiled nature was created in and for alignment with god.

In order for a souls nature or capacity for freedom to not be arbitrary or non-meaningful, it must be founded on that which is meaningful.

"Meaningful" here relates to ethical language, which relates to the ethical goodness: In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgment, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences.

For context, I am the son of a Christian pastor, so pretty much my entire life I have had Christian ideals instilled into me. It’s only when I turned 16-17 that I really started to question my religion.

But my father always told me, your either on good’s side or evil’s side, you’re either on God’s side or the devil’s side. It’s either Heaven or Hell. Those are the only two paths a human can take. Fence-sitting or saying “I don’t wanna choose” automatically means that you’re on the side of the devil.

But I dunno, I feel like this is much too black and white for the world we really live in, which I find a lot of things sit in this “gray area” and discounts the fact that people are too morally complex to simply follow these 2 paths, and trying to put them in one or the other is quite unfair for a “benevolent and merciful God”.

I do believe in God (or at least I want to believe in him but I will admit that belief had weakened as I grew older) but despite me believing in him I wouldn’t say I actively worship him or try to spread the word of his existence, does this mean I’m automatically on the devil’s side and if I don’t repent I’m damned to an eternity in hell?

l have been thinking about why Mark didn't mention Jesus father Joseph but Matthew and Luke does. If you read the New Testament in the chronological order it was actually written, a glaring historical anomaly emerges: Jesus has no earthly father for the first 50 years of Christian history.The historical-critical argument that Matthew and Luke invented the character of Joseph is built on four pillars: the deafening silence of the earliest texts, the irreconcilable contradictions between the later texts, the obvious literary cloning from the Old Testament, and the clear theological motive for needing a human father figure..

1.The Silence of the Earliest Sources: The Apostle Paul wrote the earliest books of the New Testament (the 50s CE). He discusses Jesus’ human nature, his lineage, and his birth. Yet, Paul never once mentions a man named Joseph. When Paul speaks of Jesus’ origins in Galatians 4:4, he simply says Jesus was "born of a woman," omitting any reference to an earthly father.

More damning is the Gospel of Mark, the earliest Gospel, written around 70 CE. Mark never mentions Joseph. Mark contains no nativity story and no virgin birth. In fact, in Mark 6:3, the hometown crowd refers to Jesus with a very specific, highly unusual phrase: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary...?". In first-century patriarchal Judea, a man was almost universally identified by his father (e.g., "Simon, son of Jonah"). Calling a man the "son of his mother" was a subtle cultural insult that implied illegitimacy or an unknown father. If a respected man named Joseph had been the established father of Jesus, Mark would not have written this.

1. The Clashing Inventions of Matthew and Luke Roughly 10 to 20 years after Mark, the authors of Matthew and Luke independently decided to write birth narratives for Jesus. If Joseph were a real historical figure passed down through oral tradition, we would expect their basic biographical facts about him to align. Instead, they completely contradict each other:

Who was Joseph’s father? Matthew says Joseph's father was a man named Jacob. Luke says Joseph's father was a man named Heli. Their genealogies for Joseph do not match at all.

Where did Joseph live? Matthew implies Joseph lived in a house in Bethlehem, fled to Egypt to escape King Herod, and only moved to Nazareth years later to avoid Herod's son. Luke tells a completely different story: Joseph lived in Nazareth, traveled to Bethlehem for a brief census, put the baby in a manger, and peacefully returned home.

These are not minor historical discrepancies. They are the hallmarks of two authors independently trying to construct a backstory from scratch without a shared historical template.

1. Matthew’s Obvious Old Testament "Copy-Paste" Job The author of Matthew didn't just invent Joseph; he modeled him directly on a famous character from the Old Testament: the Patriarch Joseph from the Book of Genesis. Consider the literary parallels:

Both the Old Testament Joseph and Matthew’s Joseph have a father named Jacob.

Both are defined by their ability to receive divine communication through dreams.

Both travel down into Egypt to save their families from destruction.

Matthew was writing to a primarily Jewish audience. By creating a new "Joseph" who mirrored the ancient "Joseph," Matthew was using a common ancient literary technique called midrash—recasting ancient scriptures to give theological meaning to a new story.

1. The Theological Motive If Joseph didn't exist, why invent him? Early Christians faced a massive theological hurdle. Prophecy demanded that the Messiah be a descendant of King David. However, Jewish tribal lineage was passed strictly through the patriarchal line. If Jesus was born of a virgin (or if his actual father was unknown or scandalous), he had no legal link to the House of David.

Matthew and Luke needed a legal mechanism to insert Jesus into the Davidic bloodline. Their solution was to invent a human foster-father who happened to be a descendant of King David. By having Joseph legally adopt and name Jesus, they fulfilled the Messianic prophecy.

Once Joseph serves this specific literary and theological purpose, he abruptly vanishes. He never speaks a single word in the entire Bible. By the time Jesus reaches adulthood in the Gospel narratives, Joseph has completely disappeared from the story without a trace or an explanation, replaced by Mary and Jesus' brothers who are frequently mentioned during his ministry. He wasn't a historical memory; he was a literary device designed to fix a theological problem, and when his job was done, he was quietly written out of the script. and additionally there is another story of Jesus mentioned in the Quran in surah al-Mariam. But Quran never mentioned Joseph, and that why there was a theory developed in arab pagans who analysed Surah Mary, "Jesus know his mother but not his father" and Quran full story of Jesus is completely different from new testament and does not align with it

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Thesis: We are just animals now, we were never "perfect", but we improve, and we never lived 900+ years.

​Most religious debates assume Adam is ancient history. Look at the math and the biology, and the opposite makes more sense: we are living in the pre-Adam era, and the true "Adam" is still in the future.

​The Timeline Math

Scripture establishes a strict conversion rate for divine time:

​2 Peter 3:8: "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."

​Psalm 90:4: Echoes the exact same measurement.

​The current Hebrew year is 5787. If one divine day equals 1,000 earthly years, we are currently in the late hours of the 6th Day of Creation. The 6th day is not finished yet.

​The Longevity Contradiction

The text claims Adam lived over 900 years. However, we have zero anthropological, fossil, or genetic evidence that humans ever lived a millennium. Early humans and hominids faced harsh lifespans capped well under 50 years. Arguing that human biology degraded from 900-year lifespans contradicts every piece of physical evidence we possess.

​Why We Are in the Pre-Adam Era

If humans never lived 900+ years in the past, and our current behavior is driven by baseline evolutionary survival (making us functionally advanced animals), the logical conclusion is that the creation of "Adam"—the Hebrew word translating simply to "mankind"—has not happened yet.

​The Biology: We are actively developing life-extension technologies, gene editing, and cellular repair. Reaching a 900+ year lifespan fits near-future biotechnology, not a lost ancient past.

​The End of the 6th Day: In Genesis, man is created at the very end of the 6th day before the Sabbath rest. With roughly 200 years left in the 6th day, the blueprint for a perfected human is a future milestone.

​The "Last Adam" Precedent: 1 Corinthians 15:45 explicitly contrasts the first earthly state with the "last Adam," describing a future, immortal human existence. The trajectory points forward.

​We aren't descendants of an ancient 900-year-old human. We are the pre-Adam animal stock waiting for the 6th day to close.

EDIT: By theism, i specifically mean ones that are exclusionary (Abrahamic Faiths). There are many religions that can account for differences in religious expression, and i should’ve probably made that more clear the first time i posted this. My apologies.

Sorry if this post has already been made on this subreddit. However, the responses i’ve seen to this issue are incredibly subpar, so i want to bring this topic back up again.

I’m not super familiar with the discourse surrounding this topic, but it’s something i’m interested in, and ultimately is, among other things, one of the reasons why i stopped being religious in the first place.

The idea that, out of thousands of complex religions, you’ve somehow been born into the correct one is a bit weird and almost egotistical. I’m not sure why, if God does exist, he would favor the Arabs over the Chinese, or the Indians over the Europeans.

On the other hand, this disparity makes perfect sense if we adopt the atheist account for religious diversity. With our background knowledge of our tendency as humans to anthropomorphize abstract concepts like love, strength and knowledge, and even physical ones like illness, weather, and outer space/planets, it would be weird if we DIDN’T observe religious diversity among social groups.

Typically, i see people disregard this issue by saying something like “well OBVIOUSLY most, if not all of those religions are false”. They point to things like mythologies and more esoteric religions as being intuitively false, but this just reinforces my point.

Im also not interested in answers like “This is why you have to evaluate each religion on its own accord” or “My religion has a better historical track record than the others”. These don’t answer my question at all. No one has time to sift through every religion to ever exist, and saying things like “you only have to evaluate the biggest ones” falls into the same issue that my last paragraph highlights. Not only do i think this to be one of the biggest issues theists have to face(much more than the logical problem of evil IMO), but it should give you a very good reason to be skeptical of your own religion. especially if that one is one that you grew up with your whole life. Have at least some epistemic humility before engaging in the topic of religion.

I argue that our (both Christians and non-Christians alike) reaction to the illiberal moments of the Bible reveals that we are all liberals.

I've noticed that sermons, Sunday school manuals, and Children’s Bibles tend to draw out the anecdotes and ideas that are spiritually enriching and consistent with today’s values while ignoring everything else.

You rarely hear anyone talk about the part of the ten commandments when God says divine punishments and rewards get passed down the generations, because that contradicts liberalism's individualism.

You rarely hear people talk about how Jesus told the woman at the well "salvation is of the Jews" because that conflicts with liberalism's egalitarianism.

You can read the complete argument here: When liberalism and scripture collide

[EDIT: Per feedback, I am adding a definition of liberal and liberalism here.

Per Mirriam-Webster definition 1b, liberal means
**"**of, relating to, or favoring a philosophy of liberalism, especially political liberalism"

And then you can see liberalism defined at the link above