We do?

Probably that you're straining yourself to hear what you want to hear because it conforms to your preconceived notions how religious adherents behave.

Take it a step even further back, how do they know about religions in the first place?

That the indoctrination was effective?

Aaron, all your posts here ever tell me is that some Christians don't take either the command to be humble or the one not to bear false witness seriously.

Which, given the fact that claiming "God loves ME and is going to let ME live forever" is something only an egotist would say in the first place, is not surprising.

(At any rate, on more than 20 occasions, Christian prosletyzers have offered philosophical proofs of God to me. Plus there is the internet. So despite your typical lies and douchebaggery, I am hearing things right.

And if Jesus really were God, he would take away your ability to type. You are a terrible representative of the religion. You are very lucky it is actually BS as you would burn in hell if it weren't. )

We can add that to the list of duties God is negligent on

1. Feeding kids in Africa
2. ****-blocking tornados
3. Making aaron STFU
4. wtf guinea worms are you ****ing kidding me?
5. ???

Needs made into a poll imo

LOL

LLLLLOOOOOLLLLL.

Your claim is completely unsupported. What makes you think that Jesus only wants good representatives?

I have considerable evidence to support that he doesn't.

I'm loving this thread much more recently.

Actually, the best way out of the Problem of Evil is to assume that God isn't all powerful. (There's no real reason one would need to be all powerful to create the universe anyway. Just powerful enough to create a universe.) God lacked the power to create (or hire) effective PR people, so instead She got incompetents like Aaron.

Not sure the reason for the LOL here, if you take YouTube as an example, what was generally an atheist-dominated user base has become quite a lot more balanced recently. One thing Christians are 'good' at is taking what has been used against them and claiming it for their own use
e.g. "religion is bad" leads to "atheism / ToE / etc is a religion", "faith is bad" leads to "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, and with the popularity of YouTube amongst atheists, now Christian apologists, Churches etc have 'flocked' to create YouTube channels and to flood atheist video comment sections, since it seemed to work so well for the atheists.

Citing "the internet" as a source of the balance of people making arguments is a terrible idea. I think this should be fairly obvious.

If you go to a random Christian congregation and talk to a random congregant (who claims to be a Christian) and ask them what the cosmological argument is, I'd estimate that there's less than a 5% chance that the person would know the answer, and less than a 1% chance that the person would be able to give a reasonably good statement of some version of it. If you explain what it is, I'd maybe increase the chances to something like 10-15% that the person will say something like "Oh, I've heard something like that" but some of those will still have no clue what you're talking about.

These numbers go down significantly if you allow yourself to leave the US.

Hate to be nit picky but I have a better way. Assume that there's no god.

When I think of God's PR people, the Bible belt springs to mind. Huge guffaws swiftly follow. Are there Muslim equivalents of people like Ted Haggard?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinquae_viae#Summary_2
[1] Some things are caused.
[2] Everything that is caused is caused by something else.
[3] An infinite regress of causation is impossible.
[4] Therefore, there must be an uncaused cause of all that is caused.
[5] This cause is what we call God.

That’s how theologians intend these arguments to be read. They support [5] from revealed theology with, “before the world was I am,” sort of claims. But as Aquinas notes, what [5] is getting at is ultimately grounded in faith, hence, there’s no claim being made that the argument “proves” their God exists.

Yes this came up, I think Zumby posted it. Then we talked a bit about whether or not an infinite regress is possible because if it isn't , it renders the OP question meaningless. In fact, that's pretty much what the whole thread became.

I’m not debating the soundness of the argument. lawdude seems to think that theists, who do believe it is sound, glom onto it as a way of proving the existence of their deity of choice. It’s the latter I’m arguing is a strawman. It’s like saying WLC is glomming onto the KCA because he believes it proves that Jesus is God. He knows better.

I'm not sure about [3] but I'm not qualified to argue it so that was pretty much the end of the inquiry for me.

It isn't a strawman. The only thing "cosmological argument god" and Jesus have in common is the name and the claim of creating the universe. Everything else is different. So when WLC and others assert that their revealed theology relates to cosmological argument god, they are lying.