You do realize that modding is not my day job, right?

Would that not go without saying when I described it as free time?

That is not what I wrote or even remotely implied.

I was a theist at one time, but became an atheist precisely when I acquired the ability to analyze my beliefs objectively.

If the existence of the biblical Christian God could be objectively established by evidence, we could reasonably expect it would inexorably become a routine part of our scientific/historical body of knowledge. If so, a consensus of acceptance would emerge that's largely independent of geography and culture. Examples of this include the heliocentric model of the solar system, the germ theory of disease, and plate tectonics.

Instead, we observe the exact opposite; religious belief is almost entirely still correlated to upbringing. Not to mention there is a negative correlation between those who are most adept at objectively assessing evidence and those who hold religious beliefs. Why do you think that is?

LMFAO.

In terms of history, islam is clearly far more impressive than christianity. We actually have a pretty good picture of the guy and what he did, and we know he actually without doubt overcame some pretty harsh conditions to create an enormous empire and second most popular religion of all time.

To contrast, historians from christian culture itself know far more about Mohammad than they know about Jesus. LMAO. LMFAO. Your reasoning is even more ridiculous than I thought. Historical evidence. Hahahahahaha.

All the same right back at you, good sir!

THIS THIS THIS!

#49

+ this:

There's probably 1+ other arguments I'm missing that are also good.

Take a wild ****ing guess Jib

I don't believe that people are punished for eternity in Hell.

I think it is an eternity if they make it an eternity. And some like Satan choose to because they will be considered last in Heaven so he would rather be first in hell. This is a subject i have not put much effort into studying mainly because i don't think it is as important as everything else.

Cannot access, or are not given access? Is it your contention that there is physically not enough clean water for the world? That is something that can obviously be shown true or false.

This is of course only an issue if you can prove that there is physically not enough water for the world.

So there is nothing physically possible that we can do about this?

So this is something that cannot be stopped? Man does not have the capability of doing anything about this?

See above.

again, see above.

So it is your contention that there is no benefit to the balance of water in the world?

Do humans not have the power to give everyone clean water?

And "no god" makes no sense at all. It makes so little sense that no one on this forum is willing to take the position that God does not exist.

you need evidence if you want to contend that the christian God does not exist.

Answer my questions and we will see if this "evidence" you presented pans out.

You have yet to prove that there is physically not enough water in the world for all of the people. Until you do that there is really nothing to discuss.

Free will leads to the death of innocent people. Is it your contention that there is no benefit to free will? Or that the benefit out weighs the negative? If so please elaborate.

You do expect that it should be an "episode of the gummie bears". I have no doubt that you personally would complain even if there was only one thing to complain about.

This is such a horrible analogy. Let me ask you, what do you think that I believe is the reason why bad things happen? What do you believe I believe is the reason that God allows such things?

Then tell me where in your analogy this is accounted for.

I have no idea why you think God allows this but I assume it has something to do with valuing free will and God wanted to teach humans lessons or some such.

As I've said in the past, I have to give my kids tough love because the world is in the state it is. God doesn't have to live with those limitations. God could have have built heaven on earth from the start. It could have been the Garden of eden with a bit of discipline thrown in, but in an active way, like a parent - if he wanted to teach good lessons. Or we could have been imbued with those lessons already in us. We could have such a natural distaste for harming each other that only a precious few would do so. I mean, there are so many other ways this planet could have gone that would have resulted in so much less suffering, that to suggest that our world is the result of an all-loving god is extremely hard to justify.

Rather, our world is much more consistent with a deist God: one that doesn't intervene, and may not even care. That let's not just bad things happen, but atrocities, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Despite it being trivially easy for such a being to prevent such things.

A God who would allow such cruelty and misery to continue unabated (and let it get so bad at one time that his only option was to kill everyone!) is inexcusable for a loving being. I think you know this and I think you (and many other theists) find the presence of such misery in the world to be extremely uncomfortable to your theistic views. And if there is a God who allows this: you should be quite angry with him. If he's testing us, its pure capriciousness.

Do you know why I believe that free will is necessary?

Jib, please respond to the last two paragraphs of post #154.

You keep saying this. I'm interested in what this evidence is. You also keep saying to "look at the history" or something.

Why can we take the accounts of miracles and the resurrection to be historically accurate?

There are miracles taking place right now but you can care less.

Just about everything going on in this world has already been predicted, but you could care less about that also.

Obviously these things aren't as interesting to you as trolling RGT and watching GSP do push ups.

There are strong emotional reasons not to believe that God exists, more specifically the biblical God. This can be shown to be true by the resistance to things like the age of the earth. I am sure that you agree that the age of the earth has been established by the evidence, right? So why doesn't everyone just fall in line?

This can show that people don't rationally think about what they believe. In other words they don't hold their belief for rational reasons. Would you agree?

If yes,

Then you would have to agree that peoples belief being culturally "formed" (or any of the other things you mentioned) has no bearing on whether or not the belief in the Christian God is rational, because people are not being rational to begin with.

Well, I can understand not having time to respond to everyone. I was complaining because your OP seemed to indicate that you would respond more fully. And anyway, you have responded to more of the arguments, so I am basically satisfied.

As to the strongest arguments that you haven't addressed, I naturally believe my own argument is the best in this thread.

Rational people will arrive at Christianity?
Non-Christians have emotional reasons for non-belief?

I feel like I'm in the freakin' twilight zone.

Fair enough. I never know how much time I will really have.

I believe that I have responded to all of your posts. One of the issues though is that we have differing beliefs in the historicity of the NT. This will be much harder to hash out here then any sort of logical argument.

Let me ask you though, if I am correct about my belief about the historicity of the NT( and by this I do not mean that the claims are necessarily true, but that they are in fact the claims of the supposed writers, etc), would you then belief that belief in the biblical God was the most rational? I suspect you will answer no.

If no, then there does not seem to be too much of a point focusing on this as it clearly is not the center point to your argument.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcjSDZNbOs0

it must take some serious talent to twist logic into a pretzel like that. impressive.

This post is so ridiculously childish and simplistic I'm not even going to bother reading through the thread and so may be repeating the points of some rational posters. The burden of proof is solely yours.


- as much as I hate the use of labels I will trot a few out to help describe myself. I am a rationalist, a materialist, a humanist and very strong atheist.

When I say that I am an atheist I mean that I am atheistic in regards to ALL of the thousands of ancient and modern claims regarding gods not just the current most popular three, those being the christian pantheon of one, wait there are three, wait , no it's only one again, or two and something else, no wait it's all one and three..., also the god of mohammed, oh revered raider of caravans and rapist of nine year olds, and of course all the hundreds of contradictory, repetitive, fun and whacky avatars of the hindus one true multitude of god gods....


How silly would it be for me to claim that the universe and all life was created mere seconds ago by an all powerful salamander that resides in my sock drawer and that any evidence to the contrary was made to seem so by him as a test of faith? Can you disprove this? You of course cannot. This is the equivalent of claiming the abrahamic gods are real that the claiming the bible is true and accurate because the bible is true and accurate and then asking to be disproved.

As to wether there is a deistic god that created everything and left it to run on its own from the point of the big bang on and skipped off to wherever gods go when not creating universes.... who cares? it is a question that cannot be answered which makes it irrelevant.

If you claim to have a supernatural buddy who loves you and cares about your daily life you are a child or a fool.


BTW are you a believer in all of the gods of past and present or just the one? towards what gods are you atheistic? do you believe that Zeus once ruled the universe and yahweh beat him out in a cage match and that is why he says "thou shalt have no other gods before me" or maybe he was just kidding?

First, thanks for proving that whether you reply to a given person or not is a product of your will, not time constraints.

I'm going to go against my instincts and pretend for a second that you want an honest conversation and investigation here.

I don't have the exact amount of naturally fresh water on earth and the exact amount of fresh water needed to sustain the current planets population. Although, I'm quite sure without modern purifying and cleaning apparatuses, which man - not god - made, we would basically be ****ed.

I also don't see why you seem to think that this is a critical part of my argument. Let's assume for a second that there is in fact enough naturally clean water on earth to sustain the population. Why did god feel the need to bless some areas with it greatly, and offer virtually none to other areas? That doesn't seem fair at all. Also, since your god is omniscient, shouldn't he have known in advance that it was possible that free will could have allowed humans to hoard a lot of it for themselves and keep it away from others? If he knew this, which by the christian definition of god he did, then why didn't he plan in advance and put extra rations evenly spread out throughout the planet in order to undercut so much intense illness, suffering, and death of people who were utterly innocent?

http://environment.nationalgeographi...shwater-crisis

It is almost certain the existence of humans has helped increase the clean water supply, not reduce it. Sophisticated cleaning and purifying systems have helped greatly. Of course, unfortunately only an extremely small percentage of humans who have ever existed have had access to them.

Lastly, let's say that you're suppositions are right and that the freewill of some greedy human beings hoarding all the water for themselves were the only reason people dying of thirst. This does not in any way preclude god for making an exception for the innocent people who are getting scammed out of nourishment. A loving god that can do anything would provide such people who were being scammed by others' free will, and in turn dying from it, the clean water they need in order to survive. God hasn't done this. I can only conclude that if a god exists, he either doesn't know about such a situation, or he doesn't care about the situation, or both. This means such a god couldn't be both omniscient and omnibenevolent. If the christian god exists I would expect to have seen many interventions in my life time where he was helping the innocents from enduring massive suffering. We don't see that though. The best your god can muster is having scribe's write in some ancient manuscripts thousands of years ago about some dude who maybe, possibly, walked on a sheet of water, and turned water into wine. If god wanted to show his infinite love, allowing jesus to turn water into wine and walk across a lake wasn't exactly a great idea. Helping innocent people dying of thirst every day would have been much smarter and loving, I think even you wouldn't dispute this, but I could be wrong.