Religious Knowledge Thread

[Coney]

Originally posted by Baby-K
Ta hun, at least this makes sense to me. If ye can, read The Secret Diary of God, sorta along the same lines as yer logic

Aye.......I've been keeping an eye open for that book, not found it yet tho

[Baby-K]

Originally posted by Coney
Aye.......I've been keeping an eye open for that book, not found it yet tho

Well, it is a SA book, so hopefully it will be available there, it's a very short read (finished it in a day), but a laugh. If ye can't get it I'll overnight a copy to ye (I believe ye have a birthday coming up and ye can't have the same party Sam & me are planning, but I can give ye a prezzie).

[Rían]

Originally posted by Baby-K
I have a few questions & I hope you guys can help me out:

1. Where did God come from (who made him)?
2. If God has been around forever, then why did he only make earth etc a few million years ago? Is that when time started?
3. What was here before time?
4. Is space really never ending? If not, what's at the end?
5. If aliens do exist, did God make them too?
6. If God made aliens, why didn't he just put them on earth too?
7. If we are made in God's image, why do we need to live on earth & not in heaven? Surely if we were all living in heaven and not on earth we would not be tested & sin would not exist so we'd have nothing to 'avoid' and thus we would live perfect lives & would be living with our maker (as the bible promises as reward for living accrding to God's will)
8. If God has a plan for our lives, then why doesn't he just tell us what it is in stead of watching us struggle & stumble & get hurt in trying to find out for ourselves? The struggle doesn't seem fair & serves to alienate people rather than bring them closer to him.

1. Well, I'd really like to know where you're coming from with this one, because some people bring it up like if that question can't be answered, then God can't exist, which is rather silly, IMO; especially because the people that ask that question often believe in evolution, which has the same problem: i.e., where did the initial stuff that started all the improbable chain of (supposed) evolutionary events come from? But I'll just say: does it matter? SOMETHING started somehow, we can see that! Whether it's God or a blob of stuff is really irrelevant. Personally, I think God makes much more sense.

2a - um, why not? If you are talking about the God of the Bible, then he is omniscient, and one can assume His reasons were good! And the 'few million years" figure is ONLY an educated estimate, BTW. Dating methods can be rather dicey, and extrapolations (which is how we get the millions of years figure, BTW - it's not like someone had a stopwatch when the earth was created!!) are ALWAYS dicey!! Scientists may use the scientific method to come up with various dating techniques, but the actual figure of a few million years, or whatever the current figure is (just that the figure has changed tells you something about how unreliable dating is!!) is ONLY an educated guess, based on observable patterns of the dating materials.

2b - There's lots of interesting ideas about time that have been discussed before on other threads, both Tolkien (his creation story in the Sil) and non-Tolkien. A popular idea among many Christians is that God is outside of time, and He created the world to be in time.

3. Well, same answer as #1, I suppose. Something was here.

4. I think humans will never know this (how can they?), but I think that there are indeed bounds to space. Just MHO.

5. I believe that God made everything that exists, so if aliens exist, then it follows that God made them.

6, 7, and 8 will take too long for the time I have, so that's all for now, folks! *said in Porky Pig voice*

[Elfhelm]

Here are my humanist answers. Hope you all get a laugh at my expense.

1. Where did God come from (who made him)?

Like all concepts, the human mind has to exist before the thought can be had.

2. If God has been around forever, then why did he only make earth etc a few million years ago? Is that when time started?

That's not when time started. I'll get to that...

3. What was here before time?

There is no such thing as time. Things happen. Your brain records the experience. You look at the recording and you call it the past, but it is not real, it is a recording. You imagine, based on the recording, what various possible recording you might make and call it the future, but only the present exists. The rest is useful fantasy.

4. Is space really never ending? If not, what's at the end?

There is no such thing as "ends". The perceiving mind asigns ends to things so that they can be talked about, but in fact everything blurs into everything else. The only reason anyone thinks there might be an end to the universe is because they create ends to pieces of it and make a logical error in leaping to the assumption that these ends are real, leading to the erroneous conclusion that there must be a terminus to the totality.

5. If aliens do exist, did God make them too?

Aliens probably exist. The chance that aliens might NOT exist is infinitely small. All it takes is primordial soup and an electric storm, both of which have a higher probability of occurring on M class planets than not.

Secondly, the question is stated in the past tense, and I've already given the humanist response to past tense vs. reality. In the present tense, there is a force of creation that is balanced with a force of destruction. If one were to name the force of creation "Stup", then the statement "Stup is making aliens constantly" is more accurate than "Stup made aliens."

6. If God made aliens, why didn't he just put them on earth too?

If Stup is making aliens, they aren't on earth because then they would be Earthlings.

7. If we are made in God's image, why do we need to live on earth & not in heaven? Surely if we were all living in heaven and not on earth we would not be tested & sin would not exist so we'd have nothing to 'avoid' and thus we would live perfect lives & would be living with our maker (as the bible promises as reward for living accrding to God's will)

Well, they will probably be ticked off at me for speaking on their behalf, so I won't. I think we made God in our own image. And We can make this world into heaven. If you lie to yourself and go against your own sense of right, then you hurt yourself and the rest of us, too, and we won't succeed in making this world into heaven.

8. If God has a plan for our lives, then why doesn't he just tell us what it is in stead of watching us struggle & stumble & get hurt in trying to find out for ourselves? The struggle doesn't seem fair & serves to alienate people rather than bring them closer to him.

Make your own plans. You are not a slave.

[GrayMouser]

Originally posted by RÃ*an

2a - um, why not? If you are talking about the God of the Bible, then he is omniscient, and one can assume His reasons were good! And the 'few million years" figure is ONLY an educated estimate, BTW. Dating methods can be rather dicey, and extrapolations (which is how we get the millions of years figure, BTW - it's not like someone had a stopwatch when the earth was created!!) are ALWAYS dicey!! Scientists may use the scientific method to come up with various dating techniques, but the actual figure of a few million years, or whatever the current figure is (just that the figure has changed tells you something about how unreliable dating is!!) is ONLY an educated guess, based on observable patterns of the dating materials.

About 5 billion, actually.

Certain ancient peoples believed the Earth was the size of their valley .

Currently we can measure the size and mass of the Earth pretty accurately, even though no-one's used a tape measure or a set of scales.

Does the fact that the figures from NASA or the Geodetic Survey on the size of the Earth have changed from an ancient tribe's estimates tell you something about how unreliable measurements are?

The figures on the age of the Earth, like the figures on the size of the Earth, have changed because we've learned a lot more since then.

Some people cling to their ancestral beliefs that the earth is very small; others cling to their ancestral belief that it's very new.

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Right, I have a Pagan question: Is there much "ceremony" in Paganism, or services, or anything of the kind, or is it basically just acknowledgement of certain deities, or what?

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by GrayMouser
The figures on the age of the Earth, like the figures on the size of the Earth, have changed because we've learned a lot more since then.

Some people cling to their ancestral beliefs that the earth is very small; others cling to their ancestral belief that it's very new.

Christianity doesn't depend upon its being very new- you know, the sun was only created on the fourth day. By what measure were the other days taken? Why twenty four hours?

I'm personally of the opinion that it was longer, though I don't think, GrayMouser, that you should put too much faith in the dating methods of the time. RÃ*an is very correct about extrapolation being commonly used, and it happens in dating methods as well as in other areas of science. Through extrapolation, science decided that the environment and evolution both were changing at an extremely slow rate. Recent discoveries have given those theories serious bashes, as evolution has with certain examples been shown to be capable of happening extremely fast. Environmental changes on massive scale also happen very, very fast. By current dating methods, within a few thousand years massive changes happen across entire continents. I spoke a lot more on this in the old evolution thread on Entmoot, and I gave more documentation there. But our knowledge of science is always improving, and as it improves it undergoes change.

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
But our knowledge of science is always improving, and as it improves it undergoes change.

and as it improves we simply verify that scientific theory regarding the age of the earth and the solar system are highly accurate because we find confirmation in dozens of different places and not just one or two.

[Aralyn]

There are several scientific reasons that prove the earth is young and not billions of years old. Here are just a few:

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.
Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old! Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity.

2. Not enough mud on the sea floor
Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e., mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters.

The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years.

Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep.

3. Not enough sodium in the sea
Every year, rivers and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates. This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, 3 billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. Calculations for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean.

I'm not trying to crush people. Please don't take it that way. Just stating scientific facts.

[GrayMouser]

I know I'm going to regret this, but...

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Aralyn
[B]There are several scientific reasons that prove the earth is young and not billions of years old. Here are just a few:

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.
Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old! Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity.[quote]

Question 7: A problem well known in the study of galaxy dynamics, and called the winding dilemma. It turns out that the dilemma pretty much vanishes once you recognize that the spiral arms are not made up of a spiral pattern of moving stars, but rather a spiral pattern that moves through the stars, as a density wave. It is also evident that spiral galaxies do not in fact retain the spiral shape over billions of years, which also dulls the edge of the creationist argument.

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/mar00.html

As for those old chestnuts of the saltiness of the oceans and the sediment on the ocean floor, they have been refuted so many times that I'll simply put in a link to

http://www.talkorigins.org/

Check the FAQs

[Aralyn]

I've heard those arguments before and they dodge issues.
Those things I said are only a few of the reasons that earth is young.
Oh and don't egret posting. I like a good debate. If we keep it friendly I dont mind answering questions and giving answers.


Air is mainly nitrogen and oxygen. There is much less helium. But this is still a lot of helium — 3.71 billion tonnes. However, since 67 grams of helium escape from the earth’s crust into the atmosphere every second, it would have taken about two million
years for the current amount of helium to build up, even if there had been none at the beginning. Evolutionists believe the earth is over 2,500 times older — 4.5 billion years. Of course, the earth could have been created with most of the helium already there, so two million years is a maximum age. (It could easily be much younger, such as 6,000 years in age.)Also, the rate of helium buildup would be slower now than in the past, because the radioactive sources have decayed. This would put an even lower upper limit on the age of the earth.

originally written by Johnathan SarfatiThis is an unsolved problem to the long-age atmospheric physicist C.G. Walker, who stated: ‘… there appears to be a problem with the helium budget of the atmosphere.’ Another expert, J.W. Chamberlain, said that this helium accumulation problem ‘… will not go away, and it is unsolved.’ The evolutionary community have been desperately looking for other explanations for the shortage, but none of them have proved adequate. A simple solution is that the earth is not nearly as old as the evolutionists think!

The whole point of my answering you is not to flame but to prove the God of Genesis and the Bible. For if your faith is based on shaky evidence (not by mans standard but by sciences standard) than how can you believe in the rest of your faith?
Besides my above evidence is a stronger piece of evidence that is reputed to be lie but I know to be true. I know someone who was there. My God is the creator of the heavens and the earth and he made it all happen. And I believe it cause we talk daily.

[congressmn]

Originally posted by Aralyn
I've heard those arguments before and they dodge issues.
Those things I said are only a few of the reasons that earth is young.
Oh and don't egret posting. I like a good debate. If we keep it friendly I dont mind answering questions and giving answers.


Air is mainly nitrogen and oxygen. There is much less helium. But this is still a lot of helium — 3.71 billion tonnes. However, since 67 grams of helium escape from the earth’s crust into the atmosphere every second, it would have taken about two million
years for the current amount of helium to build up, even if there had been none at the beginning. Evolutionists believe the earth is over 2,500 times older — 4.5 billion years. Of course, the earth could have been created with most of the helium already there, so two million years is a maximum age. (It could easily be much younger, such as 6,000 years in age.)Also, the rate of helium buildup would be slower now than in the past, because the radioactive sources have decayed. This would put an even lower upper limit on the age of the earth.



The whole point of my answering you is not to flame but to prove the God of Genesis and the Bible. For if your faith is based on shaky evidence (not by mans standard but by sciences standard) than how can you believe in the rest of your faith?
Besides my above evidence is a stronger piece of evidence that is reputed to be lie but I know to be true. I know someone who was there. My God is the creator of the heavens and the earth and he made it all happen. And I believe it cause we talk daily.

Sometimes i think God is behind this. But it is all physics dependant. It has to be God good at physics. Thats the theory i belive in.

[Jonathan]

Originally posted by Aralyn
There are several scientific reasons that prove the earth is young and not billions of years old. Here are just a few:

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast

Scientists are not sure of how galaxies are created. That's why they can't always explain the movements of the galaxies. But scientists know how to measure the age of the galaxies.
It is a question of explaining how the galaxies can move as they do when they're billions of years old. It is not a question of how to estimate the age of the galaxies by looking at their movements.

Originally posted by Aralyn
2. Not enough mud on the sea floor
3. Not enough sodium in the sea
I'm not trying to crush people. Please don't take it that way. Just stating scientific facts.

You say that the sodium halt in the sea and the mud on the sea floor increases constantly (27% of the sodium gets back to the sea each year and 25 billion tons of mud fall to the sea floor each year).
I've read much about these things in school. It is important to know that right now, the sodium and the mud increases constantly (and instantaneously constant increase). But if you look back into the past, you see that the constant increases of sodium and mud are not the same as today. E.g it could be that only 10% of the sodium returned to the sea during the last ice age. It could be that only 10 billion tons of mud got to the sea floor when life arose on earth. Maybe as much as 500 grams of helium escaped the Earth per second when the dinousaurs when the dinosaurs lived.

What I'm saying is that you can't always 'count backwards' looking at scientific facts of today and say that the Earth is much younger than the scientists say. The scientists know how to count, it's their job. They know what things to look at, which don't change with time, like radioactive decay. All materia decays constantly (not instantaneously constantly), and the scientists know that this is a good way of estimating the age of solid materia.

There is too much evidence of that the Earth is billions of years old. If God created our planet, he certainly didn't do it 5000 years ago.

I like talking about issues like this. I've practiced friendly debating with a religious friend in school

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by GrayMouser
I know I'm going to regret this, but...
http://www.talkorigins.org/

Check the FAQs

GrayMouser youre definitely right about these arguments but Ill go ahead and do you one better here since sometimes it can be a little tricky tracking down that stuff on that huge talkorigins site (which i would HIGHLY recommend all creationists look over by the way). So Ill lay out these three old creationist arguments in detail for her and others reading. I wrote this up last night but couldnt get into the site to post it and you guys have posted a few things since but just to catch up to everyone heres the response I made:

There are several scientific reasons that prove the earth is young and not billions of years old. Here are just a few:

hun these are standard creationist arguments that have been disproven again and again and again. I can only guess you got this from one of the many creationist propaganda sites on the net. To be honest Im a little disappointed someone of your intelligence is actually using these tired old creationist lies to try to ignore something that has been proven using nearly countless different scientific approaches. Anyway enough of that. Lets get to your “scientific� reasons for a young earth shall we:

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast

this argument shows a gross ignorance of how galaxies operate. A star moves away from the central area of a globular cluster for a time, slows down, reverses direction, and falls back through the central region of the cluster and out the other side. Thus, stars move back and forth through the center of the cluster. There is no net expansion. So these creationist argument simply chooses to ignore the physics and evolution of galaxies.

2. Not enough mud on the sea floor

This is an old one. First off ocean sediment is not evenly distributed all across the ocean floor. That’s just silly. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the sediment varies in thickness. The thinnest sediment is near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new sea floor is currently being generated. That is to say, sediment thickness there is zero. The thickest sediment hugs the continental margins, which certainly have more than a few thousand years of accumulation. Try around 150 million year's worth! Funny, that the measured rate of sea floor spreading, when extrapolated backwards in time, gives the same age for the Atlantic sea floor as does radiometric dating. Funny, how the sediment gets thicker and thicker as one moves away from the sea floor spreading zone. That is the farther we get from the Mid-Atlantic ridge the thicker the sediment tends to get; that thickness correlates with increased age of the sea floor as determined by radiometric dating as well as the known rate at which the Atlantic is widening. So we have verification upon verification here. Triplicate proof. Selecting isolated spots to use as evidence to make a false statement on is easy to refute. By the way there are a whole host of other reasons why this sedement thing is bogus but I wont get into overkill here.

3. Not enough sodium in the sea

Ive seen this mineral deposit thing a lot too. In fact some creationists will give a huge list of various minerals that theres “not enough of� in the ocean and then actually project out based on their percentages just how old the earth SHOULD be. In the case of aluminum you get only 100 years! Do you really think the earth is 100 years old? Come on now. In the case of sodium we get 260 million years (so much for a biblically young earth by the way).

Anyway lets get into this one shall we. Theres only one word you really need to worry about to blow this one out of the water (so to speak ) and that is EQUILIBRIUM. The influx of chemicals to the ocean is an invalid and worthless method of determining the age of the Earth. This argument has misrepresented fundamental geochemical data and ignored virtually everything that is known about the geochemistry of seawater. But then creationists are quite good at ignoring unfavorable facts. The elements ARE in basic equilibrium in the ocean. Never mind that residence times are not the times for elements to accumulate from river inflow. Never mind that plankton concentrates these elements sometimes a thousand fold or more in their skeletons and when they die they remove these elements from the sea waters. Nevermind a million other things. Just simply focus on the fact that minerals tend to achieve a state of EQUILIBRIUM in nature and therefore serve no purpose as a measuring stick for the age of the earth.

I'm not trying to crush people. Please don't take it that way. Just stating scientific facts.

you mean creationist propaganda. Thats not science.

[Lief Erikson]

At least Aralyn was polite about voicing her opinions, Insidious Rex.


I actually think this discussion is getting off-topic. The topic is learning about religions, not debating the validity of areas of their beliefs (As was said by the thread's creator in the first post). I have already debated the issue arising now in the old evolution thread, and I could enter into it again, but I don't feel this is a good thread for it. RÃ*an made an offshoot of the "what religion are you in?" thread when it became necessary because of religious debate. If any of you desire to continue this thread of discussion, now would be a good time to do that.

I think Gwaimir asked the most on-topic question to date.

Right, I have a Pagan question: Is there much "ceremony" in Paganism, or services, or anything of the kind, or is it basically just acknowledgement of certain deities, or what?

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
At least Aralyn was polite about voicing her opinions, Insidious Rex.

sorry if that came across as impolite. certainly didnt mean it that way. i really thought i was just responding in kind. maybe im just tired of hearing the same old wrong arguments from intelligent people thats all.

I actually think this discussion is getting off-topic.

agreed. no more propaganda and no more science here.

[Rían]

Originally posted by Insidious Rex
....you mean creationist propaganda. Thats not science.

IREX - puh-LEEZE! You mean as opposed to evolutionist propaganda? Just because a SCIENTIST believes that the theory of creation fits the SCIENTIFIC data more than the theory of evolution, does not strip them of their SCIENTIFIC degrees and SCIENTIFIC knowledge and right to a SCIENTIFIC opinion. Your statement, IREX, is just a v. prejudiced one, IMO.

But Lief is right - this topic is OT for this thread. We can move it to the Offshoot thread, or you can excavate the evolution thread, which went 30 pages or so. Lief and I posted quite a bit there. I don't know about Lief, but I"m not ready to go there again! But maybe some others are.

[Coney]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
IREX - puh-LEEZE! You mean as opposed to evolutionist propaganda? Just because a SCIENTIST believes that the theory of creation fits the SCIENTIFIC data more than the theory of evolution, does not strip them of their SCIENTIFIC degrees and SCIENTIFIC knowledge and right to a SCIENTIFIC opinion. Your statement, IREX, is just a v. prejudiced one, IMO.

But Lief is right - this topic is OT for this thread. We can move it to the Offshoot thread, or you can excavate the evolution thread, which went 30 pages or so. Lief and I posted quite a bit there. I don't know about Lief, but I"m not ready to go there again! But maybe some others are.

Maybe it would be a good idea for one of the staff to merge the last few posts with the old Evolution thread...........seems that discussion is just bursting to get going again

Right, I have a Pagan question: Is there much "ceremony" in Paganism, or services, or anything of the kind, or is it basically just acknowledgement of certain deities, or what?

It really depends which branch you are following Gwai.....In my experience 99% do practice certain ceremonies.......sometimes in a "formal" gathering, sometimes by lone worshippers.

[Rían]

Originally posted by GrayMouser
(1)About 5 billion, actually.

(2)Certain ancient peoples believed the Earth was the size of their valley .

(3)Currently we can measure the size and mass of the Earth pretty accurately, even though no-one's used a tape measure or a set of scales.

(4)Does the fact that the figures from NASA or the Geodetic Survey on the size of the Earth have changed from an ancient tribe's estimates tell you something about how unreliable measurements are?

(5)The figures on the age of the Earth, like the figures on the size of the Earth, have changed because we've learned a lot more since then.

(6)Some people cling to their ancestral beliefs that the earth is very small; others cling to their ancestral belief that it's very new.

It's funny, Mr. Mouser, but I can't tell if you're supporting the part of my post that you quoted, or trying to discount it!! From what I know of you, I would guess that you're trying to discount it, so I'll address it that way:
(1) The current ESTIMATE/GUESS, based on EXTRAPOLATION.
(2) um, ok - and....?
(3) Well, I certainly would recommend using the most up-to-date measuring methods available to us, and I think we've improved over measuring tapes and scales. However, it's still an estimate, altho I would say with a VASTLY lessened degree of probable error, since we're talking about something that exists in the present.
(4) Absolutely. I would be surprised if the 5 billion figure stayed there v. long. It could certainly change either way, as data observation/collection methods improve.
(5) Yes, we have. And I expect they'll change again, as we learn more. But they'll still be ESTIMATES, and especially in the case of age-of-the-earth, EXTRAPOLATIONS, and I hope the scientists involved have enough integrity to always point this out.
(6) ok ..... and?

Anyway, you guys can move this over to Offshoot, or prob. a better spot would be the evolution thread.

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
But Lief is right - this topic is OT for this thread. We can move it to the Offshoot thread, or you can excavate the evolution thread, which went 30 pages or so. Lief and I posted quite a bit there. I don't know about Lief, but I"m not ready to go there again! But maybe some others are.

now RÃ*an are you scolding me again? But I agree about the evolution thread. i read that a little while ago and it looks pretty played out. maybe we can make a science/religion thread but the mods might close it and say its been done before. so maybe these little fall outs in various semi related threads are all we have. but back to questions about religions...


basic christian question that should be easy for most: got into an argument with someone about how christianity isnt the equivilant of nazism (dont ask ). His argument was that god is like hitler in that they both condemned certain subsets of people to an inferno (the gas chamber and hell) just because they werent a certain way (arian or christian). i pretty much trashed his argument (yes ME! defending the christians! why are you laughing!) but he kept insisting that the god of the OLD testament IS this big mean monster basically that only devoted himself to ONE subset of people and all others were worthy of death. what i want to know is why are the old and new testaments included in the same book when there is such a dramatic difference in the point of view of the two works (in terms of god and forgivness and all that)? i mean you dont actually have christianity until you hit the new testament right? so why include it as if its one big uninterrupted book? i know its a dumb question but have a go at me anyway. just curious.