(Modusoperandi, I thought your crack was funny, and a clever way of pointing out the importance of bias, falsifiability, and self-fulfilling prophecies all at once. Irritation is regrettable, but then again, any humor is bound to irritate someone. Terrible timing, though, as chance would have it. Like, jeez.)

You could say that "Thou shalt not kill" is the explicit verse, but as I asked already, do you also then oppose war, the death penalty and killing animals for food?
- Ebonmuse, #279

Oh. My. Stars. Ebon, how could you forget plants? They're alive, too! Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life...

Modus: The experiment is being run here, but the results will be given to us after we're dead. Kinda like my VA benefits.

Unlike other "religions" Christianity is ultimately about restoration and relationship with God. It is outward-seeking while all others are inner-seeking. It is trusting in the finished and complete work of Jesus and what He did on the cross, it's not about what one can for his or herself.

This is just quibbling over semantics if you ask me. Christianity, like every other religion, has a list of moral duties, rules and expectations it places on its followers, rituals it expects them to perform, and specific ways of thinking, acting and speaking that it expects them to conform to.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha rose from the dead, Islam's prophet Muhammad did not fulfill detailed prophecies.

Yes, and Jesus didn't tell us the way to enlightenment and nirvana as Buddha did, nor did he deliver the last and most perfect revelation of God to humanity as Muhammad did, nor did he give us the ideal rules for a harmonious and orderly society as Confucius did. If you've studied other religions as you've said, then you should be well aware that every religion claims to be unique in some way. Christianity is no exception. It's obviously silly and pointless to evaluate other religions by Christianity's standard of what a religion should be like, just as it would be silly and pointless to evaluate Christianity by Buddhist, Muslim or Confucian standards. (I have to ask: Did your studying of other religions consist solely of reading Christian apologetics books which explain why they're false?)

I'm certain you could provide me with your long detailed counter-points to Christianity but do you think you could narrow down why you believe Christianity is false in two sentences or less?

Yes, I can. The reason I believe Christianity is false is because the evidence is insufficient to support the claims. If I were God, and if I had carried out a self-sacrifice to save people from sin and wanted them to believe this, I wouldn't hide away and leave the communication of this vital message to ancient, hazy, anonymous writings and fallible and often conflicting human messengers; I would appear to every person, in physical, tangible form, and explain clearly what I had done and what I wished them to do in response, so that there would be no room for doubt or confusion about my existence or my desires.

I mean, really, have you ever thought about how bizarre your theology is? Christianity holds that God has a vital message for us, the most important message that's ever existed, and it's absolutely essential to our salvation that we hear it correctly and believe exactly what God wants us to believe. Yet Christianity also states that God has left the transmission of this incredibly important message to human beings - human beings who are ignorant and fallible, who are prone to misinterpret the message honestly or deliberately, and who introduce errors when they pass it on. And the Bible, God's crowning book, he's likewise left to the mercies of human scribes so that all we have now are copies of copies of copies, written in ancient dead languages which hardly anyone can still understand, and there are many verses where the correct translation or the original wording is unclear. (Even most Christian seminaries believe that only the original manuscripts of the Bible, which no longer exist, are infallible - they make no such claims for the manuscripts we possess today.) The multiplicity of Christian schisms and sects, all of them arguing and squabbling over issues of doctrine, are the obvious consequence of this.

Are you really telling us you couldn't think of a better way to do this if you were God? I can think of a lot: I'd start by making every Bible indestructible, immune to any attempt to change or destroy, and I'd make it so that every person sees the text in his or her own native language.

Whereas I do believe the Bible is explicit regarding abortion and doesn't require any inference.

If that's really your belief, then it's just wrong. An "explicit" verse would be one that says, "Thou shalt not abort." Unless you're reading a different Bible than the rest of us, there is no such verse. You could say that "Thou shalt not kill" is the explicit verse, but as I asked already, do you also then oppose war, the death penalty and killing animals for food?

While I agree that as humans we do in-fact make errors but if God is real and His Word is true than it stands to reason that some have got it right.

That doesn't follow at all. It could just as well be that everyone has gotten it wrong!

So who's to say who's got it right and who's got it wrong?

You've posed a very good question, but you haven't suggested a way to answer it. I suggest that it's because there is no way within the realm of theology. When two people make opposing claims and both base their positions on faith, it's impossible to settle the debate.

Consider how this works under the opposite approach to faith, the scientific method. When two scientists disagree about the merits of some theory, they can collaborate on coming up with a scenario where their hypotheses make different predictions, then do the test and settle the matter. As a scientist, I can say, "When we run this experiment, if I'm right, this should happen, and if she's right, that should happen." (It doesn't have to be a test in a laboratory with test tubes and Bunsen burners. A test can be of the form, "If I'm right, we should find a living species with a gene that has characteristics X, Y, Z," or, "If I'm right, when we dig down to this stratum, we should find mineral deposits with properties A, B and C.")

There's nothing like this for the Bible, no test we can perform to settle the interpretation of a disputed passage. Two Christians disagree, they both claim God has told them the truth, and... what then? They go on disagreeing, that's what, and usually each group ends up denouncing the other as heretical. Since both their claims are ultimately founded on subjective personal experience, there's no way to decide among them. That's why Christians (and theists in general) are still arguing about the same theological issues that have divided them for centuries or millennia.

There are still different churches with different beliefs about which biblical books should be considered canonical. (Not all Christian churches consider the same books to be canon, did you know that? And I'm not just talking about the Catholic Apocrypha.) There are still Calvinists and Armenians. There are still Christians who believe that Hell is a metaphor, that Hell is a literal lake of fire, or that there is no such thing as Hell. There are still Christians who believe in transubstantation and those who don't. I could go on and on listing examples.

Which leads to the following question, does absolute truth exist?

Yes, but we can never know for sure that we possess it. The best we can do - which is more than good enough for our purposes - is to use the scientific method to come up with better and better approximations. Just the same way, as our technology improves, we can draw more and more precise circles, but we can never draw an absolutely perfect, Platonic ideal circle. But this only works for worldviews that can be tested by experiment.

So are you saying because God punishes people that we as humans are on equal grounds and have the same right to punish the "innocent"?

Not at all. What I was getting at is that it makes no sense to punish person A for the wrongdoing of person B, no matter who's doing the punishing, because punishments do not solve problems. But aborting a fetus is not a punishment any more than unhooking oneself from the violinist is a punishment, or keeping one's house free of people-seeds even when one manages to get past the screen (to borrow Thomson's examples).

I say that you miss the point because of the following dilemma: either a mother is taking the idea of abortion seriously, and has given it due consideration, and arrived at her decision after considering the consequences; or the mother is being frivolous, in which case she probably shouldn't be having a child in the first place. Either way, it's the mother's choice, and nobody else's: if she doesn't want to have a baby, then she shouldn't have to. Besides, if the fetus is really innocent and has a soul, then it goes to Heaven without having to deal with life on Earth and thereby risking Hell, so what's the problem? (That's only half a joke.)

...I do believe God to be the "great ethicist". On whom or what ethics do use to base your own difficult life decisions?

I base most of my ethics on the truism that joy is joyful and misery is miserable. Everyone wants joy, nobody wants misery, and sometimes the gap between "what I want to do" and "what is best to do" can be pretty big. It's pretty easy from there: minimize misery, maximize joy, and try to be happy doing the right thing. With a dash of psychology, we can find that there's no accounting for taste: one person's joy may be another's misery, in matters of sex, food, vacations, or any of a number of things, so we should try to find ways to help people reduce their own misery while opening as many paths to joy as possible. Because we all have to get along but we can't all get our way, politics is necessary and necessarily a mess, underscoring the need for transparency and accountability in governance so that a few don't get their joy at the expense of the misery of many. And because perspective can help us greater appreciate what we do have while learning to get along without what we don't have, some philosophical training is also good.

So if God's such a great ethicist, on what are his ethics based? How does his ethics work? And what makes God's ethics better than mine? And on what basis are you judging the two systems comparatively?

...if Christ is real, then the penalty He paid for my junk makes it easy(ier) for me to forgive those who are my "enemies".

Good conditional! But that's a mighty big "if" I see there. I also like that you put "enemies" in scare quotes, because I think that all enmity is invented and we're all in this together. Now, I understand the importance of examples, but would the principle of Christ's example be any less motivating to you if the story were made up? I mean, I take inspiration from fictional stories that I know to be false, like Candide or The Creation of the World and Other Business or Frankenstein. Consider the possibility that even if Christ is not real, the principles on which he acted might be worthy of following anyway, which could make it just as easy to follow them in your own life. What do you think?

You already know the answer to this question, why repeat it?

Oh, but I don't. Seriously. What I do know is how I will proceed, whatever your answer is. See, whatever you give me, I'll ask the same question: now why should I buy that? You'll eventually have the option of saying that I just do, which makes no sense, or bringing yourself around in a circle, at which point I'll ask why I should buy into the whole circle. Or there's a third option which I'm missing, in which case I'd be super interested in where things go.

So you see, I really don't know the answer. But I'm pleased that we can cut to the chase, so: if I just need to believe, then why should I buy that I just need to believe? (Your say-so? God's say-so? The Bible's say-so? Why should I follow any of those orders, or believe that they're even legitimate orders to be followed?) If it goes in a circle, then why should I believe in the circle? (If I "just do", then we're back at the first question; if there's a bigger circle, why should I buy into that one?) Or if there's that third option, then what is it and why should I buy that?

Correct, God does punish people for their sins, both in the OT and NT because we all fall short, all of us are "in sin"; the foundations of His throne are truth and justice. So are you saying because God punishes people that we as humans are on equal grounds and have the same right to punish the "innocent"?

So, wait, none of us are innocent, except that some of us are? When do fetuses/babies become non-innocent and therefore worthy of hell? (I would also disagree with your statement that "the foundations of His throne are truth and justice," considering that the system you seem to be advocating is simply not just.)

On whom or what ethics do use to base your own difficult life decisions?

I suspect that we base them on the same source, only you misattribute that source as coming from god. Our culture has a much more profound affect on our morality than god does. Xians simply take their cultural morality and then turn around and claim that it comes from god, but a cursory look at history is enough to disabuse one of this notion, else why would Xians throughout history support such evils as slavery, unequal rights (some still do!), Crusades, Inquisitions, etc.

If fetus' could talk maybe then we'd change our minds on the matter, atleast I'd like to think so.

I'm sure many would, since that would indicate sentience. Too bad for you that is not reality.

Here's the thing, if Christ is real, then the penalty He paid for my junk makes it easy(ier) for me to forgive those who are my "enemies".

How does transferance actually work? How does some other guy being tortured and killed somehow absolve you of any wrongdoing that you may or may not have done?

Regarding "improving self worth", I guess the term is rather vague to me, becoming a Christian does improve one's life both directly and indirectly.

Maybe it does sometimes. Sometimes leaving Xianity improves one's life both directly and indirectly.

Unlike other "religions" Christianity is...

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Xianity really does make some unique claims...so what? Many religions (if not all) have unique claims, but you don't seem to think that their uniqueness makes them more believable, so why should we take the purported unique claims of Xianity to be evidence that it is more believable? Also, having unique claims is not a reliable indicator of truth - and sometimes it can be a good indicator that the claim is not true. So, why present this as an argument for your position?