Only insecurity demands to be praised. Not understanding this, man conceived of a jealous and praise demanding god. Why on earth would an almighty god need such praise? Even when it is due, demanding it is a tacky and ugly and insecure thing.

So we discover a god who subjugates women like our culture does, who hates homosexuality like our culture does, who is all into brutal killing and stoning like our culture is, who is all into sacrifice of animals and even people like our culture is, who is cool with slavery like our culture is, who is all kinds of magical/miraculous/superstitious like our culture is ...

Who created "Him"?? Is god just like we want him to be, a virtual product of our culture .... or are we making it up from our own biases and projections??

What's the answer?

A preacher just prayed: "I speak healing to my viewers." Do you believe it? From another source a miracle claim surfaced about a leg growing back. Do you believe it? Or is it bullcrap?

This exactly why God does not exist! I have said it many times, if God did design this world, then he must be evil, he/she can't be called a real God!

How do you feel about the belief in a transcendent God that is beyond our ability to conceptualize?

So a God that his unable to use is divine powers to make US see and interact with him!

What kind of God do you guys think about when speaking about "God". Is this God of yours some kind of moron or something?

The word "God" surely means all powerful with powers we can't even imagine, are you saying that he can't even make us aware to him?

If you can't conceptualize it how can you even talk about it or say anything about it?

Example: in 1900, physicists could not conceptualize quantum mechanics. They never said a word or wrote a word about it. With god, trillions of words are written and spoken about this thing they can't conceptualize.

When the only defense is, "I am intentionally ignorant of the answer," there is a problem. For instance: "Love keeps no track of wrongs" (a scripture), "god is love" (a scripture), god killed the entire human race save eight plus countless others at different times because they did wrong .... AND I JUST CANT SEE HOW THIS IS A PROBLEM. Which is code for I have to claim ignorance ("can't conceptualize it") because the answer is devastating to the dogmatic position.

When we start with "the god stories are all good and perfect" (whatever the religion), when we get to the pro killing, pro cruelty, pro stoning, pro rape, pro slavery, pro torture, pro bashing babies heads in, pro genocide, pro bigotry stories, passages, scriptures, etc. ... we are forced to say, "Yes, the stories and lessons are obviously good, we just can't conceive of how."

And that is a total default on our moral compass, not only amoral (ceding it all to supernatural stories of eons ago), but immoral in practice.

Human beings are endowed with an ability to develop a concern for right and wrong. Giving that away instead to an imaginary brutal supposed entity that unabashedly narrates its own killings, genocides, torturing, slavery, inane laws ... is not a virtue but a default in the moral realm.

A true believer gives the moral faculty away to any of 10,000 gods, as history proves, because they got indoctrinated with the idea that "being religious is what makes someone good." Such is exactly opposite the case.

You went off on a tangent, so I’ll try restating the question. Is the belief in a transcendent God (or transcendent good) beneficial? Is the embodiment of that belief beneficial to the individual?

Homosexuality is not wrong; it's in the Bible because that was the bigotry of the day. Slavery is not right; it's approved of in the Bible because it was the custom of the day. Stoning children and women for "immorality" isn't right; it's in the Bible because brutal man was behind it. It's not okay to kill witches; it says it is in the Bible because it is being conceived of by primitive superstitious man. The Bible doesn't tell people how to cure leprosy (anitibiotics), because there was no omniscient god or itinerant preachers who knew that.

To look at all this from the starting position of "It has to be right and good because it is in the Bible," is extremely immoral and represents a superstitious blockage of our more reasonable ability to think about right and wrong. "I don't have to think about right and wrong, it's covered in the book of bashing babies heads in gleefully is god's work."

That's not what you asked before. What happened, did the answer to your actual question undercut your "you just gotta believe" position?

So now you have a new question which perhaps you'll be honest enough to admit is different. We'll see. Your new question is the tangent away from the essential material in my post.

If you are okay with god is finding me parking spaces, helping me win contests, looking over me benevolently (having killed like no other entity in history), while others starve to death, are tortured, are slaughtered, are abominations ... etc. etc. etc. ... then the belief I have a magic parent in the sky, whoops Hubble didn't find heaven yet ... can be falsely reassuring to you. Just like all the other belief in gods can be. If on the other hand, you care whether or not it is a just so fairy tale, like the Tooth Fairy, then it is deluding.

Is the belief in all the other gods beneficial to the person who believes it?

Anyway, isn't such an attitude kind of selfish? Is this belief beneficial to me? Is that the spirit of the religion?

Is all the killing and stoning and bigotry and genocide and slavery and bashing babies heads in part of the "transcendent good"?

I would ask for a yes or no answer, but it is pretty predictable that such an answer cannot be forthcoming from a true believer. But surprise me. Is that part of the transcendent good? Give your answer however many words.

I share your criticisms, but you seem to be so eager for combat that you are making productive discussion impossible.

True believer: "Yes, I am on the side of the killing, the bigotry, the slavery, genocide, the stoning, the torture, the magic, the superstition ... because it says it is okay in a book from thousands of years ago. I forego my capacity to think for myself about it, and make the obvious judgments. I call this the good ... this kind of faith. IT SAYS IT IN THE BOOK THAT WAS DESIGNED TO CONVERT PEOPLE THRU FAITH WHEN THERE IS OBVIOUSLY NO OTHER STANDARD TO BELIEVE IT."

However, I do maintain that each and every god that someone believed in could be "waiting for them" upon their death. This seems possible in a quantum universe ... the whole thing - the god and everything else - being a figment of the mind, transduced by the mind, meaning interpreted and created, assembled and constructed in large part by the mind.

Typical response is, you can't possibly know what God thinks or what God thinks is best!

A religious person will do what they are told, regardless of if it is right ... and claim blind obedience as a virtue. A spiritual person will weigh and attempt to do what is right, regardless of what they are told, realizing that obedience is a vice and a weakness.

You seem really bigoted.

You seem really pissed off.

Clue: Religion had no part in that.

No response to the seemingly irrefutable arguments, then more pitiful ad hominem. For some reason the faithful are evasive of the central issues when woken up to them, then attack the messenger. Such ploys help the religious out of a very immoral corner, once they realize what it is.

So far the only rationale I've heard is "I presupp for my religion," or maybe "I just believe whatever the book says." Congratulations. Kindness and respect is my religion, and it doesn't require mass killing, surrender to archaic types of bigotry, crazy laws, sacrifices, belief in magic. I must be evil, thinks the true believer.

People are terrified of their own soul and will do most anything to avoid it ... and the pendulum of the mind swings between sense and nonsense, right and wrong (Jungian ideas). Religion is the primary way in which people whitewash the whole thing. Gnosticism, on the other hand, confronts the issues without using magical ideas and escapes.

No, I largely agree with the argument from evil against the existence of a God like you are describing. I just think your view of religious people is bigoted. I've met a lot of religious people in my life, and your description of such people as obedient drones who won't think for themselves is not accurate in my own experience.

You are projecting and scapegoating in an attempt to resolve your inner conflict, which is an archetypal religious practice, and it’s regressive. Propositional beliefs matter little. How one responds to inner conflict is everything.

It’s long past time for Christianity to give this issue the seriousness that it deserves. Doubt and uncertainty, even atheism, need to be components of an evolved Christianity of the future.