What with my fundy upbringing, i thought i knew the bible fairly well. then i came across this: 

Matthew 27:51-53 

 51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

If you believe God created the earth circa 4,000 bc and chose to reveal himself to His chosen, the jews, i can follow your logic (well sorta).

However, if you belive in OE, then how do you still hold xianity valid? B/c you understand relatively speaking, judaism is a much younger religion vis-a-vis (i luv that term, makes ya sound pedantic--luv that last word too--that's all i got outta ma edumacation) other earth religions: i.e. people of the Aryan Mtn regions, Far East, Egypt, etc.

So wouldn't Yahweh have revealed himself to the FIRST people of the world (who obviously were not people in Palestine circa 4,000 bc)?   

I thought of starting this topic because RRS has been attacked numerous times that it's focusing on Christianity only. The truth value of that accusation right now is meaningless, but, since it has been brought forward, I thought of doing something about it.

So, here would be the arguments that work against all (or at least most) religions at once.

1. argument from creation account - most religions have a creation account, which should be obvious since "how we came to be" is possibly the most important question that religions seek to answer. The problem is that religions do not agree on how the world was created, how long ago, by whom and with what purpose. Right now, no religion stands out of the crowd with a more coherent and plausible account, and none bring any proof of their creation account. While some religions do estimate that the Universe is extremely old (some possibly getting close to the actual age), still there is no "more plausible" account to validate one (or some) religion(s) over the others

i really hope this is in the right place but i shall go ahead for now.

I dont have a bible handy on me right now , but i am pretty sure that the only ruling agains Homosexuality was in the old testament.

so my question is since you guys and girls keeps aying the old testament rules dont count anymore since jesus sacrficed himself. why is homosexuality seen as wrong?

I work in moral philosophy and i recently devellopped this idea about the whole "no morals without god" idea.

The big thing about that I believe is that this sentence is an historical self-fullfilling prophecy. Let me explain.... Before the rise of christiannity, there were a lot of schools of moral philosophy in the roman empire such as sophisms, socratism, platonism, epicurianism and stoicism. These schools were trying to explain by rhetorical or philosophical arguments, and MOST of the time without ANY reference to the supernatural why we need/have morals.

The Dark age that followed not only impeded science or education, but also for more that 1400 years there were almost no writting, research or debate on morality without any reference to god. We have to wait until 1700's or so for that to come back very slowly.

Person A (we are figuratively speaking here cuz i know you will probably cry about something) gets a PhD in the field of scientific studies. Person B gets the SAME EXACT PhD, yet person B uses his education in the glory of God and finds ample evidence of creation. These two people go through the same schooling, get the same degree, yet work in different fields. Then some athiest comes along and automatically assumes Person B has a lesser education than person A.

The Athiest glorifys a man because he has a piece of paper framed on his wall. They criticize a christian for believing what they read in a book or heard from somebody. Yet the athiest does the same thing, they believe what they read in a book, or what somebody tells them, but because its written of told to them from a certain point of view they forget that they are just as religious and deem it "science". They don't think for a minute, "how accurate is this?, could Person A have fudged these results just so he could get the outcome he wanted?, could Person A have lied about his research?" Because you studied it in a book how do you know its true? Because your teacher told you how do you know its true?

I'm sure you're familiar with the argument.... free will and an omniscient God cannot coexist.

I recieved this response:

"Now onto freewill - the point we are missing is this...  We, as people are bound/limited by time.  We do not live forever on this earth and we are often in the habit of hurrying from place to place, always watching the clocks as time ticks away.  But, truly, time is a measure of something that never ends.  God has always been and always will be.  He is not limited by time... He started what we know as time on the earth when He formed and created the world.  He started things perfectly and we turned away from Him.
Now here's the freewill part, having always been and always being - GOD knows from the beginning to the end of our lives on earth.  He can see it all. 

I was debating one of my fundie frriends during lunch the other day when a deist joined the argument. Intriuged about her religion, I began probing. As she does not have any texts to base her beliefs on there are no contradictions, etc. When I presented her with arguments designed to point out the logical inpossibilites of a god, she simply responded that her god was not omnipotent, he (or she) is just much more powerful than we are, and was able to create the Earth. She believes that god answeres prayers based on his or her personal whims -- god's more an observer than anything else.

I was unable to make much logical progress against her god, except to present the question: why reach to the spiritual realm to answer questions instead of using the physical realm of what we know for a fact to be true. To this she responded that she cannot believe that there is no soul, nothing after existance, that the universe always was.

This guy is really ignorant on how and why people become Atheist, amongst many other things.

Why am I the only one defending RRS over on his blog?

http://faithandreasononline.blogspot.com/2007/03/desperation-of-rrs.html 

I've had a few conversations with Jews over the net and discovered that my preconceived notion of what Jewish means are not entirely accurate.

I presumed that when someone referred to themselves as Jewish that it meant they were of the Jewish faith. It turns out that is not necessarily the case. It's more about tradition and not actually a belief in Yahweh.

I've only gotten a small sampling of this so am not sure how widespread this is. From my current understanding you have religious Jews(the ones with the facial hair decorations) and regular Jews.

If anyone has a better grasp of this, I would appreciate your input.