Talking with a Deist is almost as bad as talking with a Christian! My head hurts now!
So, here was their argument:
1. Religion is created by man, so therefore flawed
2. Because anything written was written by man, it cannot be trusted because men are flawed
3. You can only be as good as you can be and try to seek God in your heart
4. Many religious principles are good, even if men are bad.
My responses were:
1. Yes, religion is created by man, but one can have relationship
2. What makes the Hebrew Scriptures verifiable is prophesy. We can look at what was prophesied before it happened, and because of where we are in time (2012) we can look at if those predictions were true. If they were accurate, those scriptures can be trusted.
3. You must have a way to measure "good"
4. Religious principles do not have a track record of being "good"
Deist response:
1. You can truly know God on an intellectual level
2. We can't really translate because interpretations change
3. Most everyone agrees murder is bad
4. The religious principles that followed were the bad ones.
My response
1. You had better use your mind or you will get into a lot of trouble. Most of the problems we have is because people don't "think", just "believe", "feel", or "have faith".
2. Translation and interpretation are two different things. We haven't even gotten to "interpretation" of scripture because we don't yet have accurate "translations". The more accurately we translate the less we have to interpret.
It just went downhill from there with him bringing up the Mayans and Incas and they had prophecies that came true as well and there have been zero accurate prophecies that were specific. Again, I asked if he has ever seen an accurate translation of scripture and he went back to not need an accurate translation because everyone just interprets things the way they want to anyway. The circular reasoning literally gave me a headache! He went as far as saying that all religious men were bad, just look at all the people that Moses killed! I was like "what?" He then said "all the women and children "he" killed because they didn't do what he said God told them to do. It tried to explain that it was useless to dialog further because if we have such variant translations, we can't debate how many people "Moses killed".
Then he just kept bringing up the Incas and the Mayans!
Edited by user Wednesday, September 12, 2012 9:50:07 AM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
