Mark Humphrys (politics)

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Original Sin and The Atonement

Freedom of thought

The church changes its beliefs over time

The church has not always been anti-abortion

Catholic Church sex abuse cases

The Magdalene asylums

Miscellaneous

The Shroud of Turin

Atheism

Atheism - Arguments

The Bible

The Bible in its Own Words

Science and Religion

Killings for Christianity

Christianity and the Holocaust

The church and Islamism

"Christ's Life In Us" (Irish schoolbook)


Christianity

A collection of links to sceptical sites on Christianity. See also links to sceptical sites on Islam and Judaism.





Original Sin and The Atonement

Seriously, is there anything more strange than the attempts by Christian thinkers over the centuries to assign meaning to Jesus' death?

Jesus was a nice person. He told us nothing new intellectually. He told us nothing new about science, medicine or history. But his morality was promising. And he never killed anyone. His murder was an outrage, and a terrible crime. But it did not achieve anything. It was just a murder.




The attempts of Christianity to find some meaning in Jesus' death have led them to ridiculous stories like in the above image.
How many Christians even believe this?
From here.



However you phrase it, it makes no sense at all.



See full size. From here.



God "explains" original sin and the Atonement.
From "NonStampCollector".



OK, "NonStampCollector" will try to explain the Atonement again.
Jesus wakes up and asks anxiously: "Did it work? Did my sacrifice of me appease me?"




Freedom of thought

For over a thousand years, the church banned books and executed their authors. Heresy, atheism, human rights, democracy, science. Many of the greatest, most noble thinkers in history were banned.


Some writers placed on the Index of banned books




The 1755 Lisbon earthquake spurred the growth of deism in the West, as European thinkers considered for the first time that God might not care or perhaps even exist.



Darwin in 1859 was the man who finally allowed deists become atheists, by providing an answer to the Argument from Design.




The Catholic Church changes its beliefs over time



What else will the Catholic Church change in the future? It is obvious that in the future, the church will change its position on contraception, homosexuality, women priests and married priests. It will forget that it ever opposed them, and the fact that it ever did will just become the humorous answer to a trivia question: "The church once opposed contraception - oddly enough!"





"Christ's Life In Us" (Irish schoolbook, 1970)





The church has not always been anti-abortion




From here.




Catholic Church sex abuse cases



The Magdalene asylums



Miscellaneous




The Shroud of Turin





There is a lot of truth in this.
No one can look at 1400 AD Europe and be happy with what had happened since the Romans.
Imagine an alternate history where 15th-17th century science started in the 5th-7th century AD. Imagine where we would be today.
From despair.com.



I ask: How come no religion knew where humans came from before Darwin?
Jesus never told us that humans evolved from animals. He hadn't a clue where we came from. He was just a man, not a god.
Muhammad hadn't a clue where we came from either.




"This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. ... Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth."
- Pope Gregory XVI explicitly opposes freedom of speech and freedom of religion in his encyclical of 1832.


"From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.""
- Pope Pius IX explicitly opposes freedom of speech and freedom of religion in his encyclical of 1864.



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Twitter is saved, 2022: In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter and started to end the censorship. It looks great so far. Twitter seems to be saved.