ShakaUVM's Journal: Testing Christianity

As far as the law goes, Jesus said that he wasn't there to change the law, but fulfill it. While he never broke the law himself (the pharisees criticizing him for breaking the law were actually in error), his point was this: "The law was given to man for man's benefit. Man was not given to the law. God wants a merciful heart, not blind obedience to the law." Does that make sense to you? It does to me.

The question after Jesus was whether non-Jews would have to follow the law, as the covenant was with the Jewish people. Peter and the others held it did (i.e., you'd have to be circumcised to become a Christian). But Paul's viewpoint won, which is that the law doesn't apply to Gentiles, but the greater moral law does.

>>And of course, there's zero evidence to support any of these religious claims anyway.

Is there? Certainly people act differently when highly religious, and that is measurable. If a religion's claim is that it makes you happy (or not care about being happy, like with Buddhism), you can test and measure that.

>>As an engineer, if I doubt something, I can set up an experiment and determine if it works or not.

You can test electrons. It's rather different trying to test God. More importantly, most statements of this sort are dishonest -- even if an experiment of some sort showed that God might have intervened, the doubter would doubt it anyway. You know, like with a religious friend of mine with a terminal brain tumor that vanished between two visits. There's an infinite number of explanations to this, but a doubtful person will always select the one that doesn't involve religion, making the test fundamentally dishonest.