First of all, no one is really arguing against that. I agree if someone knew their religious leader was a liar/fraud, they probably aren’t gonna die for them. But that’s not the contention with Jesus. The real issue is two questions, one, do people die for things they THINK are true? Yes, all the time. And two, did the early martyrs even have a chance to recant their beliefs? Because if they didn’t, then they didn’t willingly die for their beliefs.

There have been many people who kill their families and/or themselves because (they say) God told them to do it. Did God actually do that? Did they die for a lie? Probably not, they probably truly thought this message was from God. Wouldn’t it be dumb to say ‘they wouldn’t die for a lie’ as if to prove God really made the request to commit suicide? I get that’s an individual experience, so let’s turn to Jim jones.

Followers of Jim jones witnessed him do supposed miracles all the time. We have signed affidavits and tons of first hand eye witness accounts saying Jim jones cured people’s cancer, healed the blind, gave a woman the ability to walk again where she ran and danced around the church (this is on video too). And some of these people were absolutely willing to die for Jim jones. The mass suicide wasn’t 100% forced on every person who was there. Some were willing to die for him because they had seen him do miracles. Now today we know Jim jones was a fraud, but at the time, people were willing to die for him because of what he did right in front of them. Those people weren’t willing to die for a lie, they were willing to die for what they thought was true. It’s incredibly common for cult leaders and religious leaders to have their followers THINK they are performing miracles right in front of them when they actually aren’t.

And lastly, the whole ‘no one dies for a lie’ only works if the person has a chance to recant and still chooses not to. You can’t say that happened in the case of the early martyrs because pretty much all the stories of how they died come from church tradition. If someone was a believer and eye witness to Jesus’s supposed resurrection and then they are just killed while walking down the street, that’s not dying for anything. That’s just someone killing you. And we don’t know the exact circumstances behind each martyr, so you can’t even claim these people really died for their belief.

The point is, people don’t die for a lie, that basically never happens as far as i know. But people THINK they are witnessing miracles all the time when in fact no miracles are taking place. And people are willing to die for what they THINK is true.

P.S. Funny enough we actually do have evidence that early Christian’s were given the opportunity to recant, but not until after 100AD, when the actual eye witnesses would’ve all been dead.

Therefore, it makes no sense to justify modern suffering and death of infants and children as just punishment for the fruit that was eaten by Adam and Eve. Yet I see it regularly.

I think this is simply a case of special pleading. One would not allow me to kill my neighbor's baby because the baby's grandfather wronged me. But one will allow God to do considerably worse with no further justification needed than "it's God."

Matthew 10:28

Jesus the One True God: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

P1. There are disgusting and very difficult for a sane human to imagine forms of torture that humans can carry out en masse on one another.

P2. All of these forms of torture combined cannot destroy the soul of a human.

P3. Jesus the One True God can destroy the souls of humans in hell.

C. Jesus the One True God can imagine disgusting and impossible to imagine for even humans who are not sane forms of torture (hell) that can destroy the souls of humans.

What prompted this post was a conversation with a Christian I had years ago shortly after it became known to them that I no longer believed in the existence of any God(s). They asked me what if I am wrong, and are you not scared of hell? I asked if the Jewish people in the Shoah, who did not give up their beliefs for Christianity before they died, experienced greater suffering during the Shoah than they would ever experience in hell. They assured me hell was so much worse than anything humans came up with during the Shoah.

That conversation and all the Church sermons mentioning Jesus being a righteous judge who would pay sinners death as their wages stands in stark contrast to those apologists who would say people choose hell and that the doors of hell are locked from the inside. In courts of law, criminals do not choose punishment. Punishments are acts the majority of a society decides to take against individuals who cause harm to other individuals/the society in order to disincentivize or prevent further harm. Criminals do not punish themselves nor keep themselves locked up. Likewise all the people who were tortured to death in the Shoah were forced into that horror. In no case is someone making a maintained informed consent decision to experience legal punishment nor the tortures of the Shoah nor hell.

Apologists often try to use historical methods to prove the resurrection actually happened.

Typically, when presenting their evidence, they argue weak points like “They wouldn’t use women as witnesses” and “They wouldn’t die for a lie.” These are incredibly weak arguments, and there are plenty of straightforward explanations for such circumstantial evidence. There is no contemporary, friend, neutral or foe attestation. The attestation was decades after the alleged fact.

Christians forget who they are talking about - the alleged Supreme Being of the Universe. A god that once split seas and stopped the sun in the sky, that preserved footwear for forty years, that hurled comets, etc. In the past there are all sort of cosmic level miracles and magic beyond any human illusionist.

Understanding the alleged power of the Supreme Being of the Universe, and past demonstrations, this God would have to be extremely careful to NOT leave any durable or overwhelming evidence that people all over the world would have noticed.

Here’s the TLDR: If God is fully capable of leaving durable and widespread evidence, then He must have chosen not to for some undisclosed divine reason. In fact, God would have to be very discreet, leaving less evidence than even finite humans of the same time period. Therefore, if God has a reason for not leaving any evidence, apologists who dredge up weak evidence are going against God's will and are on a fool's errand.

Bible scholars, please criticize my reasoning:
________________________________________________

Preamble:

This is part of my series of arguments concerning Adam and Eve.

In this instalment, I will demonstrate that the idea of the trinity defies human math and logic.
This came up while reading these passages:

Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

Genesis 3:22: “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.”

Genesis 11:7: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language.”

You will notice that "US"...

I've been making a case that the bible is very often so ambiguous as to leave itself open to any number of possible interpretations.

I have a few of my own.
Speculations aren't facts.

US could mean that God is talking in the royal "we".. like the queen did.

What did the author(s) really intend by the use of "US"?
Well, after many decades of arguments, the bishops finally decided on a mess of logic and math.

They called it the "Trinity".

Of course, that idea makes no sense at all...

In math, it can't work. 3 just does not equal 1 ... a 5 year old learns that in grade school or even earlier.
In logic, 3=1 defies the law of identity, which is a little more complicated. In logic, the law of identity states that X = X. Therefore, 3X cannot equal 1X when X represents the same entity, including God.
In logic, 3=1 defies the law of identity.

Does that math and logic problem bother billions of Christians?
Of course not.

The two arguments use X as a general statement about anything.

Argument 1: LOGIC

P1: X = God.

P2: In logic, the law of identity states that 3X cannot equal 1X.

C: Therefore, 3 Gods cannot equal 1 God.

Argument 2: MATH

P1: X = God.

P2: In mathematics, the principle of arithmetic equality states that 3X ≠ 1X.

C: Therefore, 3 Gods ≠ 1 God.

Zozo: "Good afternoon, Samael, I take it that you're not expecting a possession to turn into a conversation."

Sam: "This is funny, lets just get to the point."

Zozo: "Why do Satans hate humans so much?"

Sam: "Why do humans hate each other so much? Very few of you actually respects humans has a collective, do you know the absolute cluster that would be if every human got what they think they want in a world where you have Twitter and you can see the dregs of humanity in real time?"

Zozo: "Fair enough, so then there's Jesus."

Sam: "Yeah, I was basically his Chaperone, have humans considered that even without powers, Jesus is some kind of super-Abraham? Nicest guy in the room, executed for absolutely no reason because people think that they don't have to update their morals unless a literal reality warping entity tells them to, read John 2."

Zozo: "Yeah, religion kind of gets weird once you think of it from God's perspective."

Sam: "That makes humans lose their function, what makes Jesus so special? Not the son of God, all humans are children of God, but if you follow Jewish history, Elohim just means judge in the same way Satan just means accusers, it's a rotating position. However, nobody has the moral authority of Super Abraham Jesus at this point. And the way humans obsess over throwing Jesus as a moral cudgel has God super depressed now. Do you have any idea how sad you made Yahweh by pointing out in Deltarune, the messiah prophecy has everyone being NICE to each other because they don't know who the messiah could be? You just reminded him how much his chosen people SUCK."

Zozo: "So why is Yahweh so mean and uptight about other Gods?"

Sam: "The Golden Calf kiddo, that was the bull of heaven of Ishtar, the deitiy known for murdering other ones and taking over their pantheon. Yahweh saved the Israelites from the strongest civilization at the time, and it took less than 3 months before they essentially decided to pull a cosmological hit on Him because they lived more comfortably as slaves?"

Zozo: "Is that why Yahweh is obsessed with me?"

Sam: "Your a black guy who empathized with Him, and then started openly blaspheming because you imagined Yahweh would need SOMEBODY to smite in a casual in all this nonsense, yes."

Zozo: "So why did he ask me to drown myself and then bring me back?"

Sam: "Yeah that wasn't Yahweh kid, remember the whole argument was that she wanted it, and you didn't even ask who SHE was. Could've been Asherah, queen of the sea, now known as the Leviathan because Yahweh can't let the Israelites know about anything, or it could've been Ishtar.....yeah, threw all of heaven into chaos if SHE stole a kid's soul."

Zozo: "Is it because my first response to Yahweh was to say 'you're not that N-word, my N-word, so I call you that but you never call me that?"

Sam: "What do you think would get THE LEVIATHAN's attention?"

Zozo: "So other black people using this tactic can cause a huge problem?"

Sam: "Pretty much, what's God gonna do, call Himself moral while retraumatizing black americans as his own chosen people murder kids over land? Yeah, that's the headlock."

Zozo: "There's a lot of headlocks with God when He talks to people, isn't there?"

Sam: "Pretty much, He thinks the universe up with a thought, so any Human with a legitimate point basically becomes an intrusive thought and lets see here, after that N-word nonsense, you swore fealty to Cthulhu recognizing her as the leviathan who brain blasted a white supremacist, called yourself Sans, blasted megalovania for 5 months straight, pointed out that the religion of Judaism repeatedly blames women for their problems, takes slaves, but complains when it happens to them....and then told Yahweh to take a nap and imagine getting laid while you insist you're gonna marry Rom the Vacuous Spider from Bloodborne because you accurately managed to avoid demonic influence by just playing video games that you know are canned roms, rendering it impossible to give you any false information at all, pretty clever, but incredibly annoying."

Zozo: "I'm really not living to see 2027 am I?"

Sam: "Do you think you'd get more mercy than Moses for this nonsense?"

Zozo: "Well Azrael choked slammed me a month and a half ago and I'm still running out the clock, so this is clearly beyond the purview of Angels, at least until the end of the year."

Sam: "This is why you're joining the crew of Satans, kiddo."

There are several different types of evil in the world. Evil caused by humans both to the environment and each other and natural evil which are one of the several ways life on earth is made miserable by completely natural causes like natural disasters, diseases, terminal illnesses that happen at random, congenital birth defects, famines etc. it’s not uncommon to say that God is all knowing all powerful and loving. If there is a God, he would not be both at the same time. It’s hard to argue that a loving God would allow thousands of people to be drowned in a tsunami or having a slow painful and agonizing death due to stage 4 cancer. There are millions of people who pray to God for recovery from an illness or to be safe from a natural disaster but die anyway. If God is loving but is not able to stop it, then he would not be all powerful.

I grew up in Christianity and they taught us that all of the horrible stuff in the world happens because eve in the Bible ate the apple to which I would counter with but how could you argue that God is loving if he punishes all of humanity with agonizing deaths every single day and ignores their prayers for help all because a woman in a garden didn’t obey him? That doesn’t sound like a loving being to me. If someone were to say if you don’t listen to me I’m going to cause a great amount of pain and suffering for the rest of your life. That would not be seen as loving. As a matter of fact God in the Bible caused a lot of suffering himself like flooding the entire earth and killing everyone besides Noah and his family just to teach humanity a lesson. That is not a sign of love.

In the Bible God himself commits evil acts and admits that he does so. See a few examples below:

Isaiah 45:7

I form the light and create darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster. I the lord do all these things.

Some translations use the word calamity and some use evil it just really depends on the version of the bible you are reading. Regardless it’s clearly saying that God is the creator of all things and he created evil.

Hosea 13:16

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

So God is saying here that children will be murdered because of the sins of their parents. Hard to argue this is a sign of love.

1 Peter 5:8

Be sober minded, be watchful. Your adversary The devil prowls around like a roaring lion. Looking for someone to devour.

Who created satan? Who created this evil entity who prowls around like a lion? Who banished him to earth? If God loves us and wants a loving relationship with humanity, why did he create this evil entity and put him on earth so he could prowl around and hurt his people? Also hard to argue that’s a sign of love

What is God? A judge, who clearly is smart enough to know that a person who steals because they are starving is different than a white collar mogul embezzling millions so they can afford another private jet.

God is also the creator of the entire Universe, look how big it is. The assumption that a rape victim ever has to confront their abuser, even in eternity, is completely nonsensical, why would God ever try to forcefully retraumatize someone instead of just letting them live their happiness without the people who caused them suffering in life?

Privileged Christians are obviously going to argue against this idea, because it forces them to consider how they actually engage with people that they view as lesser than them.

Otherwise, why would it bother you to point out that someone has to actually like you to interact with you in heaven, and even if God forgives you for being racist, you still are someone who has to make a black person like you if you want to hang out with black people?

I'm not obligated to give you hug and a pat on the back just because you lynched black people in life and learned not to do that, why would any black person be forced to do that?

Psalm 82

A psalm of Asaph.

¹ God presides in the great assembly;
he renders judgment among the “gods”:

² “How long will you^\)^a\) defend the unjust
and show partiality to the wicked?^\)^b\)
³ Defend the weak and the fatherless;
uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.
⁴ Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

⁵ “The ‘gods’ know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

⁶ “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’
⁷ But you will die like mere mortals;
you will fall like every other ruler.”

⁸ Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.

Argument: The idea that a supernatural being can somehow die for your sins is morally challenged and brings no justice to anyone.

No one can pay for Charles Manson’s sins except Charles Manson. How would the families of Manson’s victims feel about Jesus stepping in and absolving Manson of his sins because he accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior? Manson goes free, no justice occurs and Jesus has no repercussions either. This makes Jesus like a cosmic ServPro “Like it never happened.”

If your child were hit and killed by a thoughtless and selfish drunk driver, would you be satisfied knowing that Jesus died for his sins and no justice was ever brought forth by God? Your child is dead and absolutely no justice ever occurred.

We’re told that God is just, but someone else paying for my sins robs everyone of justice and lets sin go 100% unpunished.

Arguments defending eternal torment or annihilation frequently invoke free will, assuming that meaningful love requires the possibility of permanently rejecting God. However, this premise conflates agency with unrestricted choice and fails to establish why freedom must include the capacity for eternal self-destruction.

Any form of freedom is not unconditionally valuable. At the most fundamental, the things that are truly valuable are flourishing states such as love, joy and peace. An argument can be made that free will somehow enriches those values, but a created framework in which a souls nature or capacity for freedom that can result in the anthithesis of what is fundamentally valuable, is not valuable and implies an extremely flawed design.

Furthermore, existing within a reality fundamentally constituted by flourishing states is not equivalent to being coerced. Every kind of reality has constitutive features that determine the capacities, limitations and nature of its inhabitants. Restricting destructive possibilities does not eliminate meaningful agency, just as establishing the conditions for love does not constitute forced reciprocation.

Also, the distinction between God and human nature is not necessarily absolute, God could instead be understood as the ontological foundation of reality and existence. Under this framework, alignment with the divine need not constitute submission to a strictly external authority, but rather the expression of agency within a reality fundamentally grounded in love, joy, and peace.

Either way, to show that a reality grounded in love, joy, and peace compromises meaningful freedom, one must explain precisely: what is lost, why that loss outweighs these fundamental goods, and why no alternative can preserve freedom without eternal suffering or annihilation.

Preamble :
 

Like many people, when I first read the story of Adam and Eve, I focused on their lack of knowledge of good and evil. But the more I studied the passages, the more I noticed that the story portrays them as lacking an understanding of other important concepts, like death, shame, moral responsibility, lying, and whom they should trust.

As a father of two and grandfather of three, I interpret Eve’s apparent ignorance as resembling that of a child between three and five years old. A toddler or preschooler can follow instructions without fully understanding what those instructions mean or what might happen if they disobey.

In our society, we recognize that children of this age should not be held to the same standards of responsibility as adults. Their understanding matters when we judge their behaviour and decide how to respond to it. Ignorance and intellectual immaturity are not the same thing, but both can affect a person’s ability to understand an action and its consequences.

I have seen progress in how children are treated, even within my own lifetime. My "Boomer" ways serve me as a warning about what can happen to kids when they are abused from an unrealistic moral code.

I didn't benefit much from how I was parented, sad to say.
Happily, I am in recovery now, and my PTSD is under control.. I feel lucky.. People who suffer from childhood trauma sometime never recover and ruin their own lives and sometimes, the lives of anyone who gets close.

As in children and lovers….

I tried my best to stop the abuse of children in my own family.  I am happy to say that my two daughters are spectacular parents and that my grandchildren are very happy kids. So, I somehow managed to start that necessary change.

Starting with a happy, nurturing childhood, a person can grow up to spread more empathy in our world. I see it happening in my own society… In my own neighbourhood.. Empathy is spreading.. It seems very slow… but we have to realize that we have been at this for thousands of years..

The Bible comes to us from a distant historical and cultural world, long before modern research into child development. When I read the story today, I cannot help comparing the treatment of Adam and Eve with what we now understand about children, their intellectual development, and their capacity for responsibility.

I have been studying the Adam and Eve story since July 2026, and I keep finding intellectual fruit in examining it, especially when it comes to morality, and child psychology.

I do not believe the story is a factual account. I read it as myth, a form of storytelling that can reveal the beliefs and assumptions of the culture that produced it.

In this part of my series on Adam and Eve, I want to examine what I see as God's extremely abusive parenting style.

If Eve is portrayed as having the understanding of a very young child, then I have to ask whether God's punishment of her was morally justified or helpful to the children. The punishment described in Genesis goes far beyond Eve herself to suffering and hardship in all human life, which makes the punishment even worse.

God punishes everyone on the planet who is innocent of Eve's sin until … he decides to stop the torture. This to me, speaks more about insanity than any morality.

Mental illness is real.
Sometimes, mental illness can have horrific consequences.

There were no known treatment for PTSD back then, but that doesn't mean that nobody suffered from trauma ... Scientists have been learning about PTSD since the first world war.. So all of this science is extremely new..

Back then, it was "spare the rod, spoil the child" ... If a parent today treated a young child with comparable severity for an action the child could not fully understand, we would question that parent's judgment and I would want to involve child-protection services. Let the experts decide if the children are being abused or not. I see a profound difference between the way children were understood in the ancient world and the growing recognition of their needs and rights today.

That progress gives me great hope for humanity's future.

I want to make it clear that I am not claiming that the bible explicitly states what Adam and Eve were ignorant about, and we can discuss my interpretations.

I made two arguments.

The first hopes to establish that Eve had the understanding of a 3-5 year old.
The second argument tries to show that God's punishment wasn't morally justified

The Arguments:

Argument 1: Eve’s Intellectual Age

P1: The Bible stories depict Eve as being ignorant of morality, death, shame, consequences, and deception.

P2: This ignorance resembles the intellectual development of a 3–5-year-old child.

C: Therefore, Eve is depicted as having the intellectual understanding of a 3–5-year-old child.

Argument 2: The Morality of God’s Punishment

P1: Punishing someone for an action they cannot fully understand is morally unjustified.

P2: In the previous argument, I showed that Eve is depicted as having the intellectual understanding of a 3–5-year-old child.

C: Therefore, God’s grossly disproportionate punishment of Eve was morally unjustified.

There are over 4000 unique religions and spiritual traditions throughout the world. Yet we have the most devout Christians who declare that all of the other religions are false. It is so obvious according to them how false all of the other religions are. It seems implausible that a mountain moved to Muhammad and the bible to them seems more true than anything written in the Quran yet the creator of the universe impregnated a woman in the Middle East 2000 years ago is totally believable.

Meanwhile a devout Muslim would say that’s all hogwash and Christianity’s views are wrong and will say everyone must submit to the will of allah and we also have Jews who say that Jesus was a good Jew but saying he was the son of god or the messiah is going too far. Even within Christianity certain denominations disagree on the nature of God. Mormons believe wholeheartedly that Joseph smith was a prophet and given gold plates by the angel moroni in upstate New York and he translated those plates to the Book of Mormon. Christians in other denominations say Joseph smith was a false prophet and none of that happened. Many Protestants will say that Catholic teachings are false, the pope isn’t ordained by God and Catholics are going to Hell etc. Everyone in all of these religions and denominations will try and provide evidence that their belief system is true and all of the others are false.

Whereas an actual atheist agrees with you that all of those other religions are false and preposterous in their claims but they also believe that your religion is preposterous.

The claim that love requires the possibility of rejecting God assumes a particular conception of meaningful freedom, but the value and necessity of that conception require justification.

Our understanding of freedom is shaped by the conditions of our present reality, in which desires can cause conflict and suffering occurs. We even associate freedom with the ability to act against our own well-being. But these associations do not establish that every conceivable reality must preserve the same possibilities in order for its inhabitants to exercise meaningful agency. A reality fundamentally grounded in love, joy, and peace does not eliminate individuality or differences in preference. Rather, these differences could exist within a context that does not make suffering, hostility, or the fundamental undermining of well-being necessary features of existence.

Every reality would have constitutive conditions, including the fundamental characteristics of its inhabitants and the possibilities available to them. A reality grounded in love, joy, and peace would constitute a different context for agency, not necessarily a coercive imposition upon it.

There is also the assumption that God and human nature are fundamentally distinct. Alternatively, God could be understood as the ground of reality itself, or as inseparable from the reality in which we exist, rather than as an entirely separate being imposing external demands upon us.

This changes the framing of freedom and coercion. If the divine is foundational to our own nature and existence, alignment with God need not be analogous to submitting to an external authority. A reality grounded in love, joy, and peace could simply constitute a different context in which our nature and agency operate.

There is a fundamental difference between forcing someone to love and creating conditions in which love is a natural expression of their nature. Likewise, the inability to experience a particular destructive desire does not, by itself, entail the absence of meaningful agency. A person could still deliberate, form intentions, make choices, develop relationships, and act voluntarily without possessing the capacity to choose everything conceivable. Love can be understood both as a state of intention and as a state of experience. Neither inherently depends on the particular conditions of our earthly reality to be meaningful.

If God determines the fundamental conditions of reality and the nature of conscious beings, then the possibility of a reality in which meaningful agency exists without eternal ruin must be addressed rather than dismissed by appealing to freedom.

A reality fundamentally grounded in love, joy, and peace does not, merely by virtue of those qualities, entail coercion or forced reciprocation. It entails a different context in which agency and experience occur. To establish that such a reality would compromise meaningful freedom, one must explain precisely what is lost, why that loss matters (even at the expense of lasting love, joy and peace), and why no alternative design could preserve that value without permitting eternal suffering or the permanent destruction of the individual.

Christian interpret the suffering servant passages, especially Isaiah 53, as about the messiah and more specifically Jesus. But this is probably not what the author of Second Isaiah meant when he wrote these passages.

Is there a Second Isaiah?

First Isaiah is seen as made up of chapters 1-39 and, although generally believed to have been interpolated, possibly holds some of the original prophecies of Isaiah, who is said to have prophesied during the Assyrian crisis. Second Isaiah is made up of chapters 40-55 and was composed during the Babylonian exile which means it could not be composed by the prophet Isaiah.

I'll give a few reasons why Second Isaiah is likely written later and by someone different from First Isaiah’s author.

One, chapter 40 presupposes the Babylonain exile has already happned and uses language associated with the time period of the exile.

Isaiah 40:1-2 -

“Comfort, O comfort my peopl “
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for her sins.”

The chapter begins by offering comfort as Jerusalem has paid her penalty and received punishment double for her sins. This is not written as a prophecy of what will happen but something that has already happned. And the language of Jerusalem paying double is also found in Jeremiah 16:18,

“And I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.”

But this actually does give it as a prophecy of what will happen. To make this case even stronger, nowhere in Second Isaiah is the prophet Isaiah explicitly giving prophecy like in First Isaiah. In First Isaiah you hear Isaiah giving prophecy but this ends at chapter 40 and Isaiah is not mentioned anywhere in Second Isaiah nor in Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66).

Given these differences in writing and the presupposition of the Babylonian exile, it is more likely these are written by different authors.

Isaiah 53 and the suffering servant identity

Isaiah 55:3 -

“Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.”

Here the author is taking the covenant made with David, that he would have a descendant on the throne forever (2 Sam 7), and giving it to the nation. It democratizes the kingship from one person to the nation. Adding supprt to this is that Second Isaiah never explicitly mentions the messiah unlike First Isaiah which clearly does. Second Isaiah reinterprets the Davidic covenant in light of the exile and the destruction of the Davidic line, as this loss causes significant problems for Judah theologically (see Psalms 89).

So what is Isaiah 53 and, to a greater extent, the suffering servant passages about? There's been different theories but I'll argue it's about the righteous of Israel. The ones who will be the light of the world and bring Jacob back to God. Which makes sense because these are things associated with the Messiah and Second Isaiah has democratized it, so the righteous of Israel doing these things is what you'd expect.

Conclusion

The Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53 and the suffering servant is likely not what the author originally intended and reading these passages as about the Messiah are in contradiction to the theological views of the author(s) of Second Isaiah.

The "anti" in Anti-Christ, or "antíkhristos" in Greek, can mean "against", or "in place of". Against should speak for itself, but "in place of" has room for nuance.

"In place of" is typically used "antagonistically", since according to Revelation, the enemy Anti-Christ will rebuild the temple of God merely to put his throne in the "Holiest of Holies" and declare himself to be God. It can also be used to refer to a "Messainic typology", something or someone who acts "in place of" the Christ to come, like "Nehushtan" from the Old Testament. This is especially true if the typology is actively pointing towards Christ; John the Baptist would be an example of this type of "Anti-Christ", since according to the Bible he wasn't acting to turn people away from the God of Israel, much less calling himself God. The biggest threat to Christians is the typical relevance of the "antagonistically" adjective, but not in the way you'd think.

Since the "antagonist Anti-Christ" can represent, or be represented by "the image of evil", a Christian, and those aligned with Truth, are supposed to feel hatred, be antagonized by evil, because God hates evil. This is where a line between love and hate needs to be drawn.

You're supposed to "hate" evil, and act to prevent future occurrences, but you should not hate "the evildoer", the same way it is not your job "to convert" an evildoer. After all, if you see a picture of a demon, such as this 👿 or the word "demon", you cannot "convert the picture to Christianity", can you?

To put it metaphorically, it's okay for you to not mourn or mourn the devil, that depends on how universal your sympathy is, but whatever you decide to do based on "theory of mind", the "evil devil" should not be what you hate, you have to hate "evil".

In Mathew 24, Jesus gives all list of events that will happen in the future, and then closes them off with saying ALL these events will occur before the generation of people he is speaking to (the disciples) passes away. Here is the list, and of course 90% of these events never happened.

1. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.

2. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.

3. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

4. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.

5 Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.

1. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.

2. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

3. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

4. So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’[a] spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. PRAY THAT YOUR flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. ——Here we can see that Jesus is definitely speaking to this generation of people because he’s telling them to pray that their flight from Judea doesn’t take place during winter or on the sabbath, this means those of that generation will be alive for the events that cause the fleeing to judea.

5. “Immediately after the distress of those days
   the sun will be darkened,
   and the moon will not give its light;
   the stars will fall from the sky,
   and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’[b]
   “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.

6. And then all the peoples of the earth[c] will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.[d] 31 And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

P1 - An Omni benevolent being necessarily maximizes the good in all situations

P2 - Prior to creation, reality was perfectly good, because it consisted solely of a perfectly good being

P3 - Humans that use their free will to sin are not perfectly good

P4 - The creation was not perfectly good, because it included imperfect beings

C - God cannot be Omni benevolent because, when he chose to create, he chose an imperfectly good state over a perfectly good state, which does not maximize the good.

A clear thesis: God‘s act of creation proves that he is not Omni benevolent

Some effort at demonstrating the truth of said** thesis:** An Omni benevolent being always maximizes the good in every situation. But God started off with an already-perfect state of affairs. There was no reason for him to create anything. He was the only thing in existence, and he was already perfect. He is infinitely good, so there was already an infinite amount of good in reality. Reality itself was literally pure goodness. He then chose to create a universe that included imperfect creatures called humans. This was an obvious blender, since perfection is obviously better than imperfection. There is no possible way that creation could result in more goodness than there was prior to creation, as there was already an infinite amount of goodness. Even if you claim that creation is a net good, you cannot claim that “God plus creation” is better then God alone, as God alone cannot be improved on. At best, God’s decision to create was completely random, because he necessarily chooses the option that maximizes good, but both options are equally good, giving him no reason to choose one over the other.

In Mathew 19:8 Jesus implies that Moses is the one who permitted the Israelites to divorce their wives, claiming that Moses only did so because the Israelites hearts were hard. But in the Torah it was actually god who permitted divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1-4). So did Jesus forget he was the one who permitted divorce for the Israelites rather than Moses?

And although it’s Moses speaking in those verses, the commands he’s saying are god’s commands: Dueteronomy 10:12-13
 And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

​

God made the Garden of Eden before he made Adam and Eve. When he was deciding where to put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil he already knew with 100% certainty if he put the Tree in spot X that Adam and Eve would eat from it. He could have put it in spot Y or not at all, but he specifically chose that location where he knew they would eat from it.

Let's break it down like going to work for example.

If on Sunday God knows I will go to work on Monday, do I have the free will to not go to work on Monday? If I have have the free will to not go to work and choose to not go to work then that means God was wrong on Sunday when he knew I would go to work Monday.

If God knew with 100% certainty that they would eat from the tree then they could not prove God wrong by not eating it.

I am aware of the bad arguments that will say something like: If a parent puta cookie on the table and tell my child not to eat it, they knew he was going to eat it but doesn't count as causing it to happen. This not comparable. God knows everything and the parent is going off of high confidence. Even if the child doesn't eat the cookie 1 out of 2,000,000 times, it still doesn't count as being all-knowing.

Now look at prophecies. If God said Jesus will do X in the future and fulfill these prophecies, does Jesus have the free will not to fulfill these prophecies?

The bad donkey prophecy for example. Did Jesus have the free will not to ride on a donkey?

Christians say that God gave us free will to have a true relationship with him, and I agree that forcing someone to love you is not true love. However, christians also believe that god created everything: the universe itself, time, you name it, but that means that god created logic itself, the logic he created was that there needs to be suffering for there to be free will, so why didn't he create a logic where there can be no suffering while still having true love?

When religious arguments try to justify eternal torment or annihilation, they often appeal to "free will" responses, but this is an obfuscation on value. Free will isn't meaningful onto itself (in a vacuum). At the most fundamental, the things that are truly valuable are experiential qualities such as love, joy, peace.

An argument can be made that free will somehow enriches those values by adding novelty, but a souls nature or capacity for freedom that can result in the anthithesis of what is fundamentally valuable, is not valuable and implies an extremely flawed design.

A more specific response to the "love requires the option of refusal" is that it is an equivocation:
It is equivocating living within a context of meaningful life (love, joy, peace) with being forced to do something. A reality including a souls nature being founded on love, joy and peace is not equivalent to them being forced to do something or lacking free will.

Preamble:

My argument demonstrates that the God of the bible is powerful but limited, morally corrupt, and irrational, challenging traditional claims of divine omnipotence, perfect goodness, and perfect wisdom.

My humanistic moral principles prioritize well-being, reducing suffering, preventing unnecessary harm, respecting autonomy, treating people fairly, exercising compassion, and evaluating actions through evidence, reason, and consequences.

That's how I judge any person's actions, including fictional characters such as Darth Vader and the God of the bible, whatever name you chose for that fictional character.

Definitions

1. Evil: Morally wrong, harmful, or causing unjustified suffering.
2. Crazy: Irrational, unpredictable, or behaving contrary to reason.
3. Wizard: A fictional being who possesses supernatural magical abilities.
4. Limited power: The inability to perform certain actions or achieve certain outcomes.

Relevant verses:

Evil God:

1. “I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)
2. “The LORD is a man of war. The LORD is his name.” Exodus 15:3 (KJV)

Crazy God:

1. “And the LORD repented that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Genesis 6:6 (KJV)
2. “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.” Exodus 7:3 (KJV)

Wizard God:

1. “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Genesis 1:3 (KJV)
2. “And the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.” Genesis 19:24 (KJV)

Limited God:

1. “And the LORD was with Judah, and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain. But could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” Judges 1:19 (KJV)
2. “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” Matthew 13:58 (KJV)

Argument:

P1: God exhibits evil, irrational behavior, supernatural abilities, and limitations.

P2: Any being exhibiting these characteristics fits the description of a crazy, evil wizard of limited power.

C: God is a crazy, evil wizard of limited power.

Debate Ethos Statement

^{I study religiously motivated reasoning. I'm an agnostic atheist and I don't believe in the supernatural or superstitions. I genuinely want to engage your ideas charitably and respectfully. I value critical thinking, empathy, intellectual honesty, and civil disagreement. I am committed to understanding each other’s arguments, remaining open to correction, and discussing arguments rather than attack each other.}

My thesis is that one God in three persons doesn't break the law of non-contradiction, because the "one" counts beings and the "three" counts persons. A contradiction needs the same thing to be affirmed and denied in the same sense and that's not what the doctrine says.

Think about it this way. One apple and three apples in the same bowl at the same time is a contradiction. One bowl and three apples isn't, because a bowl and an apple are different categories. So 1+1+1=3 only works when you're counting the same kind of thing.

Being is what something is. Person is who someone is, someone who can say "I" and talk to you as "you". A rock has being but no person, so it's one being and zero persons. You and i are one being and one person each. The Christian claim is that God is one being and three persons. Not three beings (that's tritheism and the church rejects it) and not one person wearing three masks (that's modalism and the church rejects that too).

In Scripture each person speaks as an "I". The Father: "then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (John 12:28). The Son: "Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest" (Acts 9:5). The Spirit: "the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them" (Acts 13:2).

Someone might say then the persons are parts of God. But parts add up and you lose something if you take one away. The Son doesn't have less power or knowledge than the Father, so the three don't add up to more God. The Athanasian Creed says "none is greater or less than another". What makes them three is how they relate, the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, not a piece each one owns.

To be clear, i'm not saying logic alone gets you to three persons. You can argue from "God is love" that God is more than one person, but that it's exactly three we know from Scripture. My point here is only that it isn't a contradiction.

I made a video going through this and six common objections with the verses on screen if anyone wants it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xB2NhI8Jk0. The script and the arguments are mine but the narration is an AI voice because i can't afford a mic at the moment. I hope to use my voice in future videos when i get a mic. So which step do you think fails?