You have to convince God is even a plausible idea before you can start talking about "his" attributes

Did you research the context of that passage?

Are you really going to tell me you grew up with a clergyman father and don't know that God can resurrect everyone?

Why is it that you refuse consistently to see the big picture?

Do you have some personal motive for refusing to see the big picture?

That's what you are doing you know. Deliberately searching for a reason to fixate on and find fault with God.

please please concisely without rhetorical or assuming questions, tell me the big picture.

Yeah, God sure is merciful.

Isn't Satan the real killer?

Didn't he invade human nature?

No. All these people were killed either directly by God or by God's orders. Again, what a merciful God.

The big picture is this world is a temporal world.

God has promised to dry every tear and he can do it in this world and the next if you don't let the devil upset your applecart.

no no (these are the only response to your insistence on terrible questioning)

I think we're on the same page with the first part. The second part isn't intuitive and therefore needs backup. I've seen no evidence that God exists let alone has promised such a thing anymore. That is unless you are talking about the giant tissue which will one day catch us all up at the end of our long sneeze of a journey.

Rebellion is the new Attachment imo

Fear the coming of the Great White Handkerchief.

Achoo

And the return of the prophet Zarquon.

1. States mockery is a sign of insecurity.
2. Compares other posters to "chimps" and "gorillas".
3. Lards the post with an air of spiritual and intellectual superiority.

LOL! Not to mention polarizing his views on science. He completely bashes it one second and uses it for proof the next. I guess he has to "test the spirits" first.

This symptom is ubiquitous among fundie theists and indeed pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists...anyone who has beliefs that require a great deal of cognitive dissonance to support.

Such people tend to ascribe "agendas" to particular types of experts who they disagree with, for example scientists or people who work for the government. So anything a scientist or public servant says, no matter how well supported by evidence, can be routinely dismissed because of their alleged "agenda".

Conversely should such a person from this mistrusted group say something which fits (or can be construed to fit) with the peculiar worldview of the cognitively dissonant, then it's triumphantly proclaimed as de facto true.

A good example of this is Hezekiah's Tunnel, where C14 dating is suddenly reliable and accurate.

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blo...ekiahs-tunnel/

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d...nel-revisited/

Ha ha ha, I love it! Radiological dating, useless and unreliable except when it isn't.

I guess I'll post my story on how I lost religion.

I was a Christian for around the first 18 years of my life. I had slowly been losing faith over a couple years and I finally decided to evaluate my beliefs and try to come to a conclusion. I realized that either God and heaven exist or they do not. No matter how hard I wish there to be a perfect afterlife, it won't have any effect on the truth. I'd rather seek the truth than blindingly hope for a heaven.

I took a step back and took a good, long hard look at the world. Either the world was created by God or the idea of God was created by humans. I tried to imagine a world for both scenarios.

For me, the main difference in each world was evolution. In a world where man created God, I assumed evolution to be true. Before we find evidence for evolution, it would make sense for the default belief be that we are created. It would be very difficult for an individual to come up with the theory of evolution without education. Imagine how an ape would think... why on earth would they have reason to believe they have evolved? Only recently have we discovered evolution to be true, through the help of education and communication. Even in this godless world, I would still expect people to question our existence and imagine what happens after death. They would invent gods to try to explain how the world works.

For the world with the Christian God, I expected the bible to be the truth. I would never expect there to be so much evidence for evolution and for a world that is more than 14 billion years old. The God of the bible impersonates a homophobic, racist, misogynist. It's exactly how I'd picture a group of uneducated group of people to act like thousands of years ago. There doesn't appear to be any divine intervention in the bible.

Obviously the world we live in appears to be more like the scenario in which God is made-up. It's sad to see so many people deny science and just continue to live in their fantasy world. Pick up a book and learn about the universe. Learn about evolution. If you're 100% sure God exists how could it hurt to pick up a science book? Surely your faith isn't that unstable. It's hard to refute God because the followers of today's religions assigned attributes like all-powerful and all-knowing and can make up whatever answers they want about their god, and for the hard questions they use the "God is mysterious" copout.

The worst crime you can commit against God is to supposedly not believe in him. Why the hell would he care if we believe in him? If he shows himself I would gladly believe in him. That crime against God seems to be man-made just to get more supporters for a believer's religion. If God actually does exist, he did a piss-poor job relaying his information throughout human history.

"If you don't believe in my god, you're going to hell. Just believe in him and you go to heaven."

What a load of ****. There have been thousands of gods in our past, and almost all of them have been refuted. What makes the Christian God any different?

My story is pretty simple. I never had any religion to lose.

I stopped believing the second I was confirmed at my Catholic church and no longer was forced to go to Sunday school around age 12-13. Probably moreso because I also realized Santa and the Tooth Fairy were also bull**** so I was pretty pissed. Everything I was taught in Sunday school didn't make any sense either.

Somewhere after that I started to think that when we died we just turned off like a computer and that's it. People seem to want to refuse to accept such a bleak and blunt ending to life but I don't see what's so bad about the not unreasonable idea of a nihilistic view of life in general. Doesn't that just inspire people to better value what they have anyway? It seemed kinda stupid to just use God and the Bible just to fill in gaps where science has continuously closed questions since the dawn of time...

Then in high school I took a philosophy class and a sociology class and they both really opened my eyes as to how much I actually knew about the world, which was basically jack **** other than the BS fed to me by my parents just to get me to a be a good little boy. So religion began to seem more like just a manipulation of men by other men to get them to do what they want.

Every side wants to fight a war and thinks God is on their side. There is something seriously wrong with that.

I realized people only believe in whatever religion they're indoctrinated in from birth by their parents/guardians. It's never tabula rasa take your pick. I found that to be bull****.

Then I realized that most people just believe in God via Pascal's Wager, which is the most disingenuous thing ever. Not only that, it's arrogant and naive to think an omniscient God is going to be fooled by that.

(probably paraphrasing and dunno who said it) "We're all atheists. When you understand why you reject all other gods you'll just as soon understand why I reject yours."

If nothing else, fear of eternal damnation is just a sad way to justify being a good person to your fellow man. Oh yeah, and Stephen Hawking apparently agrees with me about what happens after you die. **** it, I'll make an appeal to authority just this once.

jfc i must've drank a ****load if i'm in RGT. is this forum still a bunch of atheists and Splendour?

LOL pretty much.

Not any more.

I'm so gutted I read the first page of this thread. Had to read posts by Splendour. At least there was some good stuff near the beginning.

been spending any time on the forum in politics. Splendour's gone for real this time? What finally did it?