This strikes me as deeply confused, and I have no idea why you believe such a thing.
Cutting to the chase, you think that ancients, including Christians, did not make firm claims about supernatural entities. — Leontiskos

You seem unclear about your own topic. On the one hand, people will claim all kinds of things, on the other is the question as to what something is and is not. If you want to assert that there are people who claim to be Christian and at the same time affirm that God exists, then no disagreement. I've met such people; they're not rare. And when asked about any of the details of that existence - that I call predicates - they all (in my experience all) blow up or run away. They call themselves Christians, but in a significant way they're not.

On the topic of what Christianity is, with respect to the existence of God, I offer the following excerpt.

"[T]he proposition ‘God exists’ would seem to mean that there is a being more or less like human beings in respect of his mental powers and dispositions, but having the mental powers of a human being greatly, perhaps infinitely, magnified.... I have no fear of being contradicted when I say that the meaning I suppose to be attached by this author to the proposition ‘God exists’ is a meaning Christian theologians have never attached to it, and does not even remotely resemble the meaning which with some approach to unanimity they have expounded at considerable length....The creeds in which Christians have been taught to confess their faith have never been couched in the formula: ‘God exists and has the following attributes’; but always in the formula: ‘I believe’ or originally ‘We believe in God’ ; and have gone on to say what it is that I, or we, believe about him." An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 186-188. And here:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.187414/page/n195/mode/2up

And this:
"We believe.., but no Christian can hope to know, at least in this life, the truth which he believes.... Such is the ultimate meaning of Augustine's famous formula: 'Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand." Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, pp. 18-19.

Or to dumb it down, I hope not fatally, two questions to be answered in turn. Do you believe in unicorns? Do they exist?

It is an enormously simple question to determine whether the Mormon believes in the "God" just mentioned. I'm still perplexed that we are having this conversation at all. — Leontiskos

In discussing Mormonism, you're confusing me with someone else; I've expressed nothing on the subject. Maybe that the source of your perplexity. Which might account for why you failed to understand my question. .

It's a strange notion.... I can see how the transactional nature devalues the statement. In the Jesus seminars they consider "your reward will be great" to be a later addition. — BitconnectCarlos

Do you see the trap - that most of us are caught in most of the time? That of judging what we ought not judge. Of deciding what is right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse in a text, especially an ancient text; and in this case claiming it sacred and divine, while at the same time saying that parts of it aren't. I have become very suspicious of such eisegesis, especially if it claims to say better what the original author was trying to say and would have said if only he or she had been wise or knowledgeable enough to say it.

The right way is to establish as best one can what they said and by saying it what they meant. That done, then our critic can tell us what works for him and what doesn't. What we have in the NT is the text itself, its form in its original language mostly agreed upon, warts and all - for most of us a settled matter. That is, the suggestion that it has been edited, which I think most educated folks understand and accept, is simply (imo) irrelevant (although evidence of it might be interesting).

So I think this,

IMHO by limiting the scope of what Jesus says you'll find a stronger Jesus, — BitconnectCarlos

is part way on the right track but would modify it to focusing on what he did say or is credited with saying and trying to understand what he meant.

I find these. I have not verified them.

"Do not return evil to your adversary; Requite with kindness the one who does evil to you, Maintain justice for your enemy."
(the Akkadian "Counsels of Wisdom", circa 2000 BC)

"In this world hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible."
(the Buddhist scripture "Dhammapada")

"Return love for hatred. Otherwise, when a great hatred is reconciled, some of it will surely remain. How can this end in goodness? "
(the Taoist "T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien", circa 200 BC.)

No reason to think Jesus was familiar with these in particular, but it's a lesson life teaches often enough in one or another form that a person sensitive to such things would pick up on. And Aramaic ->Greek->English, what I take note of is Jesus's simple transactional nature of the "love" called for - do these things and you will be rewarded.

I asked for a source on "love your enemies" that predates Jesus. You did not provide one. ChatGPT attributes the idea/quote to Jesus. — BitconnectCarlos

You do realize - yes? - all the problems with this?

News to me that ChatGPT is any kind of reliable research tool. Ideas and quotes are not the same thing. Any notion of a quote by anyone not a direct recording is hearsay; not itself a disqualification, but a qualification. Absolutely guaranteed Jesus, or any person prior to about c. 1400 AD, never said, "Love your enemy." Which leaves open the question of what was attributed to him, which centers on the ancient Greek word we all love and think we understand, agape, which used as a verb, άγαπἀω, doesn't quite correspond to the noun, neither being well-served in translation by "love."

But Jesus makes clear in Luke 6: 27-36 (& Matt. 5: 43-48) what he does mean and why, and that worth a look and some consideration by anyone who claims to care.

In sum, I am ignorant (and thus subject to correction) of anything in Christianity not recounted or foreshadowed in some earlier story that predates Christianity and Judaism, the novelty of Christianity being the uses, "spin," applied to those stories in their retelling - and nothing wrong with that, as the judgment of the world for almost 2,000 years attests.

Proverbs 25:21–22, and go from there. I refer you to your own devices not because I'm lazy, but because there are more than I care to list, and because you will see them "when they're at home," when you can judge them for yourself best.

For Christianity this is not a minor mistake; it is a category error that destroys one of the most basic and most fundamental presuppositions of Christianity. — Leontiskos

Agreed. Christians believe in God. Now the question, if one's God is not the supernatural being of most Christians' belief, can a person still be a Christian? And I trust you will see this as a not-so-simple question, and not to be answered in a knee-jerk reflexive way.

Just search online, that's all I did. You will also see reference to the enemies to be loved as not just any enemies, but only those that meet certain criteria. I'm not much interested in the details. For more I refer you to this series of undergraduate lectures at Yale, starting here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY

Given by Christine Hayes, and all of them worth the watch.

Yes, but if only it were as simple and straightforward as it sounds, and it isn't. And there's evidence that it was expressed both well before Jesus's time, and also far away.

Why can't I appreciate and adhere to Christian principles — ENOAH

Principles as ideas, amen. Is there more to it? Or not? And whichever side you're on, what do you say to the other side? In my view, there may well have been a time when being a Christian meant something definite; and of that I think only the ideas/principles remain. Of those, I cannot think of any that are clearly originally Christian - anyone?

That one does not care about a question.... — Leontiskos

All right, tell us what a Christian is. Don't waste our time telling us what someone else said. You either know and can say, or you do not know. And don't be arbitrary: being a Christian - you appear to say - is a definite something: say what that something is.

As to who gets to call themselves a Christian, as the whole topic is based in nonsense, who cares?! — tim wood

You seem not to like this. Show the sense, then.

I'm not Christian, — Hanover

How do you know, if a person may ask?

[LDS] Church members believe that.... — Hanover

There seem two general questions in this thread, does God exist? Who gets to call themselves a Christian? The first oft pursued here and imho not to much effect, being a contest I style as being between rationalists on one side, and on the other the irrational. The irrational get to claim and argue as they like, but the waves of their thinking always break against the rock of the simple rational request for evidence. Which evidence, even if provided, would be as noted above and elsewhere fatal to most conceptions of God and problematic for all.

As to who gets to call themselves a Christian, as the whole topic is based in nonsense, who cares?!

But this not to say that the idea of a god is nonsense, which I take as a powerful regulative idea. But the idea of (a) god not the topic here, being itself a serious topic - the topics here being about nonsense and in some cases the learned exposition of the histories of the development of that nonsense - this latter part, unravelling the history of ideas held by people, being what some people call and understand as metaphysics.

Useful at this point to make explicit what we seem to disagree on. I take issue with the proposition that God exists in any material sense, which claim is fatal to any religion that supports it, and these days ultimately fatal to the religion itself. That is, I can describe God as being anything or in any way I like, as I can describe a unicorn as being a horse with a single horn on its forehead - which does not affirm its existence. On the other hand, if I hold that God is real in any material sense, then He is, demonstrably, this or that. This a distinction, if you will, between attribution and predication. *And between supposing and presupposing.

And based on secondary readings, I conclude that the early Christian thinkers understood this very well. That they could presuppose God's existence, take it as given, and thereby not worry about the problems that existence itself poses - attribution but no predication. Thus the creed's "We believe...". How or when or why it became, "I believe," I don't know. but on that difference one of us right and the other wrong.

You, if I understand aright, maintain that they held that God existed. I merely that they believed that God existed and were explicit in that distinction. No doubt many then, and now - I have met many - are incapable of this distinction. But I am pretty sure that insistence on His actual, real material existence, and especially with regard to the consequences of that claim, would be a heresy that might have got up a barbecue, these days an excommunication.

^Later edit.

predications — Leontiskos

Ok. You tell me something about God. And you tell me how the Patristic Fathers would have responded to someone asking how tall God was, or fat, or skinny. or bald, or smart. The problem with facts is that they come with accidents, and the Fathers were in my opinion smart enough to recognize that if on the basis of some fact you were compelled to say what God is, then you have also said what He isn't, and I'm thinking they were smart enough not to go there. So it's not a question of worrying about beliefs, but instead about what you may be forced to say about facts. Apparently you are unable to distinguish between belief and knowledge, and suppose that they couldn't either. But don't feel alone; I have lots of neighbors who cannot either.

I'm thinking English is not your native language, because what I wrote you're simply not reading right. I invite you to reread. If you want to ask about or challenge what I did write, then we can go from there.

May I ask what the odd distinction is? The first word of the creed is "Πιστεύομεν ," which means we believe - no translation slippage or trickery at all. And I buy what I've been told, that the original Christian thinkers were pretty smart fellows. At the least they thought to couch their creed explicitly in terms of belief and not of mere fact. Which only a little thought will show and demonstrate their wisdom. With beliefs you don't have to worry too much about predicates or predication, which are fatal if applied to any idea of God.

As to being the first, it's merely a matter of recognizing that a belief and knowledge of a fact are different things, though possibly sharing some overlap. I reckon lots of folks here can, have, and do make that distinction.

Or are you under the impression that belief and affirmation are altogether distinct? — Leontiskos

Affirmation as a fact.. I can affirm all kinds of things - and what would that mean? To affirm them as facts, then, would make them different, in all contexts where the difference would matter.
Edit, clarification: the Creed affirms these things as matters of belief, explicitly.

Thank you too. I note the "blatant absurdity." It seems that way to me, too. I suppose there are underlying - not so far under - issues worth discussion, but not here.

I took a quick look. It seemed to be about a small Irish village about to be swamped by a forced(?) import of relatively a lot of people. Clearly I missed what you-all saw. Thank you for the reply.

If anyone thinks it worth the effort, would that anyone in a sentence or two make clear exactly what the offence was? Ignorance here asking. Is it the phrase, "Replacement Theory," itself? Or whatever it means by reference? Or advocacy of it? That it's talked about? Or how it's talked about? No dog in this hunt, but it's good to understand.

That and he killed 40 million people.
— Hanover
That is indeed a potential failure. The goal is to subdue. — Tarskian

"Potential failure"? Being charitable, I will suppose you think and express yourself a lot more precisely in your native language, and give you credit for your efforts in English. As it sits, however, yours a disgusting absurdity. Or maybe you're fourteen years old and going through a phase of adolescent power worship. Being likely the third greatest murderer in history, behind God and Mao and ahead of Hitler, he was either on his own terms a spectacular success or a complete failure - nothing potential or half-way about it. 40 million killed is 1,000 per day, every single day, for 110 years.

Under what system of justice could he or his like ever repay what is owed - unless there's a Hell and he's in a very special corner of it..

Not a Christian so I won't answer. — Lionino

By a quick count you have more than half the responses on this thread.

What a Christian is or is not is not-so-simple - there is no shibboleth - maybe at one time. And certainly many people claim exclusionary criteria.

. The latter has centuries of sophisticated and curated thought building its tradition, — Lionino

This seems right. And I'd like to think it was evolving, but the sheer inertia of that thought also impedes its own movement, which means its ground changes even if the words don't. But it leaves the question to you, for you to reconcile. You, and others, seem to feel that affirmation of the supernatural as a fact is a sine qua non of Christianity (which in fact is not and never was true - the creed is, "We believe..."). If so, then what matter the "centuries of sophisticated and curated thought"?

My own view differs. In short, it's the thought that matters, and the supernatural clatters along like tin can trash tied in back and dragged along, making noise increasingly irrelevant and heavy enough to slow progress - perhaps fatally so.

I'm told the Greeks, the intelligent and thoughtful ones, were mainly monotheist and understood their Pagan gods not as divine supernatural beings so much as distilled personifications of human qualities and behaviors - of course not quite that simple. The Jews took an enlightened different path, Christianity being a departure from that. But for me what is interesting - if I can get it into a nutshell - is that while the Greeks, and I suppose all the other Pagans, personified their psychology/pathology as individual gods, Christians "personified" their being itself as God. And that being unendurably terrible, personified their better nature as the son of God, with whom we can all deal equitably. There are steps yet to be taken if religion is to survive - but that another topic.

Or in sum, no doubt being a Christian was once something definite. Now, not so much: anyone is a Christian who claims to be, although some of those claims, at one end of the continuum, being absurd, disgusting, ignorant or foolish, or combinations of.

Again :100:

I think it was just commonsense once the big leap towards treating society as a designable machine for delivering desired ends became a thing with the Enlightenment. Madison and Bentham both arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. — apokrisis

If I remember aright from reading, Madison has Randolph of Vir. introducing early on the form of government that the convention after debate finally settled on. I imagine the template were the state governments of the time, probably mainly Virginia's.

Not quite where the thread started, but imho yours a good place to close - I'm not going to improve on it. Anything further all yours.

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. — Tarskian

And this means what? You appear to be neck deep in nonsense and non-sequiturs. If you'd like to reset, try making a simple statement in simple terms.

I do not interpret the text like that. It spells out particular types of misbehavior to avoid, but that is exactly what morality is about. — Tarskian

You realize that the biblical God is the first practitioner of genocide, yes? And a serial offender at that. No interpretation required; it's just reading the words. And in the Laws sections it does indeed both prescribe and proscribe. Some of it still makes sense, some doesn't, and some disgusting. In my opinion we're in the middle of the age of the death of religions based on the supernatural. And it will take multiple generations because believers won't change, but will instead die out.

Of course the tension between science - call it science - and religion is unnecessary, because the creed is and has been we believe, and not, "we affirm as a matter of fact" - standards for beliefs being different from scientific standards.

:100:
Yours worth the read!
A feedback system. I wasn't thinking in those terms, only just of half of it. On reflection, it seems exactly what the founders (of the US) had in mind, a system that could repair, maintain, and change itself, but not too quickly or too easily. I wonder if it just evolved as organic sense to them, or if they had some examples in mind? I read Madison's notes some years ago, but "feedback" didn't register- maybe it was there.

I am aware that 'real' is a human construct. — Jack Cummins

Maybe this. Unicorns are real. Unicorns are not real. Contradiction? One true the other false? Unreal unicorns are real? Real unicorns are unreal? It matters simply and only how you define it - and if your definition is useful.

All you have to do is read the texts themselves. God is clearly not a respecter of persons. But society tries to teach us to be respecters of persons.

Is your question.... — kudos

You wrote that laws are not products of communities. My question: then by whom or what?

It makes more sense to him to steal.... — kudos

Maybe to some people. There's the concept of "necessity knows no law," but I don't think that's what you have in mind.

I'm thinking of "God's law" as presented in what many in the west take to be God's lawbook, the bible (I know nothing about the Quran oe Eastern religions). And in that, God's notion of justice doesn't seem very just. So I wonder it that's what you mean, or if you mean something else. As to biological firmware, consider this verse from Tennyson:

"Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —"

.

Ironically, you make the case for why one who sees the injustice of procreation would be so vocally against it. — schopenhauer1

I see you qualify your view as "one who sees...". Your beliefs get a pass from me. Anything more to it than what you happen to believe? That is, are your vocalizations expressions of belief only, or are they categorical in nature? E.g., "I believe life sucks," v. "Life sucks!"

Ah, nos4. What is any reasonable person to make of what you write? Near as I can tell only that you're a complete fool, and often an annoying one. When you make sense, I'll attend, but for the rest, even these minutes in replying to you are minutes wasted.

Seems like the real question is: 'Should we obey a law that is not enforced?' — kudos

Answer: yes.

I would argue that norms and customs are created by communities, while laws are not. — kudos

Recognized, acknowledged, established and perhaps sometimes institutionalized instead of created. And if laws not a product of communities, then from whom or what?

Those who fight against the law in order to attain their own ends are simply living out their own will that involves their self-determination, — kudos

They're called criminals.

However, organization into states is not a consequence of human civilization, — kudos

A consequence of what, then?

People often feel the need to become instruments of non-ideality. There is an imperative to live life that often gets confused with the universal idea of living life. — kudos

Do you mean "ideality" instead of "non-ideality"? I hear the cry of a good thought trying to get out of your sentence, but I cannot hear it clearly enough to understand it. Clarify?

Our sense of justice is part of our biological firmware. Civilization corrupts it, though. — Tarskian

A liitle too facile, imo. I don't know what biological firmware is, and I'd say that people corrupt it and civilization tries to maintain it.

Therefore, the best reflection of what is preprogrammed in our biological firmware, are the laws of the earliest societies for which we have records.
You can find this law in the Torah and the Quran mentioned as God's law.
While God's law is meant to bring justice, man-made law always aims to justify injustices to the benefit of the ruling oligarchy. — Tarskian

The Torah, for a guess, c. 1500 BCE, the Quran c. 625 CE. These don't qualify for oldest .Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BCE. Ur and the Egyptians, both c. 3000 BCE - and no doubt the Egyptians far before that. And never mind India and China and countless small communities that would have had laws. As to "God's law," what does that mean?
As to the justice of "God's law," you're kidding, right? And equally you're kidding with comments about ruling oligarchies, yes?

Laws should be obeyed as long as they are just. If they are unjust then adjusting laws either by legislation change or rebellion/revolution is the right course of action. — kindred

That is, by working within the structure or destroying it. But it's generally recognized that working within notwithstanding the difficulties, is better than destruction, which is ultimately more difficult.

I wonder if it has occurred to you that before you can decide what is real and what is not, you shall have to decide what real is and what it is not - and good luck with that!

I leave the final word to real people who are multi-lingual, but my own very limited experience convinces me that translation is never and can never be the same as the original. And one big clue is that it is a translation. Especially true with any writing older than even just a few generations, the more so with ancient languages. Two examples may suffice: to biblion (το βιβλίον), an ancient Greek word usually translated as "book," notwithstanding that books didn't exist and would not for more than 1500 years. Or the ordinary word "nail," as used before the 19th century. Then, hand-made one at a time; now produced by the millions at a cost of pennies or less.

Interlinear word-for-word translations reveal differences in structure, and if true can also reveal liberties that translators take, New Testament translations being rife with examples. The real problem and the biggest is also the most obvious, although for that reason often overlooked. The text in question is from a different world. Not only is the ordinary hardware of that world different, but the understanding of many abstract ideas radically different.

This is a direct threat to the values we should cherish: the protection of human rights, respect for and adherence to international law, and the commitment to diplomacy over violence.... A country that deliberately bombs hospitals, schools, refugee camps, universities, museums, churches, mosques, and entire residential neighborhoods rejects the foundations of a civilised way of life. — Benkei

Just for the heck of it, you would say the same about Russia?

Israel has the right to security, but that right should not become an excuse for unchecked power politics and the denial of the fundamental rights of others and the denial of their security. It is time for a reassessment, in the interest of both Israel and the global community. — Benkei

Are you suggesting western powers' guaranteeing of Israel's security? I'd be for that, details to be worked out.

Nothing works in any situation unless used correctly. The most that may be appropriately said on this forum is go find a good counselor (or be counseled by bad counselors yourself included).