Uh i still here.

I usually don't get involved in these debates because this is exactly how most of them wind up and I usually just wind up wasting my breath.

You guys believe in God, miracles, spirtuality, whatever. Thats' fine.

I, and many others, do not believe in any of that.

What's the big deal? Believe what you want, just stop telling me what I'm missing out on. Whatever it is, I'm really glad I'm missing out on it.

So you're just not going to answer this then?

Shows how much confidence you have in your "evidence".

I believe the evidence he presented amounted to an argument from ignorance.

Yes that and the many other wonders of this existence. Just your very existence is proof. Why have me restate the obvious over and over. You know where I stand. If you saw jesus christ right now and he performed a miracle in front of you, even then you would not believe. Look no further than the jews seeing his miracles in front of their very faces and still not believing. They thought he was demon possessed, knowing you and your "rationality" you would say you were hallucinating. Or whatever scientific explanation you could come up.

Nothing could make you believe i'm afraid. Nothing in my hands and nothing in your hands thats for sure. You hold on to the sinful nature and its resistance against god. If you don't believe, the least you could do is say " I do believe, god help me overcome my unbelief" But you aren't even there yet. I don't even think you could will yourself to believe which is the interesting part about faith. You surely can't with that hardened heart and stubbornness. Let the hate go, and let god do his work.

I understand, but when you see these types of things, they really shake you up, and as a believer, your astonished that it happened also. So I completely understand you being skeptical, but you asked, so I told.....

I can't make people believe, all I can do is tell, and let the chips fall where they may.....

So the fact that humans exist and they don't know everything is the best piece of evidence in favor of your god's existence.

Wow. Just wow.

Well the opposite also happens: The guy who just in time made the flight on 9/11, the person who almost made it through the operation until the line went flat, the woman who almost got a new kidney. There's countless positive and negative events that occur in any given day.

They weren't true believers, ldo.

Ah yes, our old friend The God of the Gaps.

Of course, but when you understand why things happen the way they do, and how things operate, what controls the basic flow of life, good and bad, then you are able to tell which is which.

In a nutshell, everything happens for a reason. And its possible to look at the facts of the situation in light of Gods word and tell why something happened. Because there are principles, spiritual principles and laws that govern all of life. People are destroyed for lack of knoweldge of these principles, because they do not learn them, because they neglect the book that teaches you them. The bible.

Basically i stopped being lazy and read the bible.

But surely you noticed it was not written in chronological order?

I used to open the bible and try to read it also, but it made no damn since to me at all. Until I was taught HOW to read it. Not how to read, but how the bible is formatted, so to speak, the way it was intended to be read.

When you open up a dictionary, at the front you will notice, signs and keys, that tell you what certain things mean, etc, how to understand what you are reading. How to interpret the things in the dictionary so to speak.

Well, the bible has sign-post, and keys, principles that have to be applied in order to understand it, in order to rightly divide it. These are not that hard to apply. But you have to know them in order to make any sense out of the bible. Or else everything makes no sense, things seem to contradict each other, which is not the case if you understand and apply the 12 principles of rightly dividing the word of God.

Still waiting...

Eman, why do I have to pester you to get you to respond? It would seem that - gasp - you might not have good answers and are hoping for the issue to just go away. I see that you have learned from the wise Jibninjas. When you encounter something that challenges your beliefs, just don't respond. Then, when confronted on the fact that you didn't respond, accuse the atheist of being mean spirited, hateful, and cold hearted for confronting you. Now the subject has changed and you don't have to answer again unless another confrontation occurs, at which point you can use one or several of the following:

1) I have a family, I don't have time to respond right now (then shockingly, never get back to responding to it later either)
2) I have a job, I don't have time to respond (then shockingly, never get back to responding to it later either)
3) Please be nicer, and maybe I will respond (then shockingly, never get back to responding to it later either)
4) I have a family and a job, I don't have time to respond (then shockingly, never get back to responding to it later either)
5) Invoke Pascal's wager again and run away (then shockingly, never get back to responding to it later either)

Yeah its a mish mashed jumbled up mess.

Your version of God is as incomprehensible to me as the one i found in the bible.

The question as to whether God exists or not has nothing to do with the coping mechanisms of humans.

To assert that God exists because it is better for your life and for society for him to exist is an extremely epistemelogicaly narrow way to look at thing and dare I say it pretty stupid.

If God exists or if we could even ever know if god exists is a scientific/philosophical question and the positive effect that believing in God has for has nothing to do with if he actually exists or not. Reality is an absolute.

An odd thing to say, since they don't have faith. That's kind of the point.

As I said before - you have to understand their position, not create this bizarre category of 'atheists who believe god exists but can't be bothered doing anything about it because they'd rather sleep in'. Or whatever it is you're conjuring up.
I'm not an atheist, FWIW, but it isn't very hard:

They think one should only believe if there is sufficient evidence to justify that belief. Considering the evidence presented for God's existence, they don't think the belief is justified.

Atheism offers nothing to me,
it never has and never will,
it doesn't make me feel good or comfort me,
it's not there for me when I'm sick or ill,
it won't intervene in my times of need or protect me from hate,
it doesn't care if I fail or succeed,
it won't wipe the tears from my eyes,
it does nothing when I have no where to run,
it won't give me wise words or advice,
it has no teaches for me to learn,
it can't show me what's bad or nice,
it's never inspired or excited anyone,
it won't help me fulfill all my goals,
it won't tell me to stop when I'm having fun,
it's never saved one single soul,
it doesn't take credit for everything I achieve,
it won't make me get down on bended knee,
it doesn't demand that I have to believe,
it won't torture me for eternity,
it won't teach me to hate or despise others,
it won't tell me what's right or wrong,
it can't tell nobody not to be lovers,
it's told no one they don't belong,
it won't make you think life is worth living,
it has nothing to offer me, that's true,
but the reason Atheism offers me nothing is because I've never asked it to,
Atheism offers nothing because it doesn't need to,
Religion promises everything because you want it to,
You don't need a Religion or to have faith,
You just want it because you need to feel safe,
I want to feel reality and nothing more,
Atheism offers me everything,
but Religion has stolen before.

Wasn't the OP asking about the "benefits" of atheism? How anyone came to be atheist is a completely separate question. This is very strange. Are we changing topics?

Haha awesome. I wish I'd had those parents.

Citation needed.

That is not proof of god, that is proof of ignorance. When we didn't know how lightning worked, people said, "Thor did it." "God" is not an answer, it's giving up on finding one.

Really? That's all science does? Sit around drooling on itself going "Durrr?" We have come amazingly, amazingly far even just compared to say, a century ago. We know SO MUCH more than we did before, we can DO so much more, just... urg.

Yes, but not for the reason you think. It's because your assertions are unfounded and yet you are are utterly convinced of your infallibility, and eagerly ready to act on your faulty assumptions about reality, in ways that can affect me directly.

Being wrong is not a scary thing, it's very human to make mistakes. Being willing to admit when you're wrong and learn new things that are right is a good thing. I want to believe as many true things as possible. I have looked for the evidence, I'm not hiding from or scared of anything.

Wowwww. Ancient greece and astronomy ring a bell? The earth as a sphere is nowhere near to being a recent concept. However, the "circle" referred to in the bible is indeed a circle. Flat, with the firmament of the heavens pulled over the top "like a tent." The phrase "the ends of the earth" is used some 28 times in the bible. This is not figurative, we have drawings of what they thought their "circular" (not spherical) earth looked like. For your reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth
PS - The objection to Columbus' voyage wasn't that they thought he'd fall off the Earth (lawls), it was that the circumference of the Earth was much too large. If he hadn't run into a convenient extra continent on the way, he would have starved to death on the voyage.

Why do you think no amputees have ever been healed by god? Are they all just naturally less faithful than other people?

This is a very extraordinary claim. Did they go to the hospital? Were X-rays taken? How do you know they were healed "instantly?" How long had the bones been broken? Was it multiple fractures, or a hairline? Are we talking about the tibia, or the fibula?

So, an all-loving and all-powerful god writes a very very important message to his creation, without which we shall all surely perish. And he can't even be arsed to write it plainly and clearly so people can understand what he's trying to say?

If you really wanted the answer you could find it. I'm sure you've asked it many many times before.
Read this book, Thousands not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth

That is assuming you can bypass all of your prejudice views.

"For some years there has been a growing realization that carbon-14 atoms are found where they are not expected." -Pg 175
Since C-14 only has a half-life of 5,730 years, there should not be any measurable amount of it in substances over 100,000 years old. However, measurable amounts of C-14 have been found in what are assumed "ancient" materials, such as coal and diamonds. Diamonds I think are the most significant, since they are assumed to be like a billion years old, and they are also the hardest natural substance on earth, so they know there isn't any contamination in the system. So the fact that there exists carbon-14 in diamonds that are supposedly a billion years old should raise some flags to people.

"The New Mexico zircons studied by the RATE team have a radioisotope age of 1.5 billion years. If this were true, then the internal helium atoms should long ago have escaped from the zircons. Instead, however, the RATE scientists and others find high concentrations of helium still present inside the zircon crystals." -Pg 176
Zircons, unlike diamonds, are not a closed system, and helium atoms that are produced in the zircons escape over time into the surroundings. However, the helium should no longer be present if the zircons are really a billion years old or older.

Another important aspect of the RATE research is the discordance among results when multiple dating methods are used on the same rock. Several different dating methods should all give the same date for a specific rock if they really are accurate measures. However, RATE has found that very different dates are given for a rock, depending on which method is used.

Another thing that's really interesting is that RATE team had the Mt. Ngauruhoe site in New Zealand dated using several different dating techniques. The site formed only a few decades ago, but dates ranging from 0.27 million years (K-Ar) all the way up to 3,908 million years (Pb-Pb) were determined for the rock. This should also show the amazing unreliability of radiometric dating methods. If dating methods are shown to be grossly inaccurate for rocks of known age, how can we trust them for rocks of unknown age? "

Bottomline is these dating systems clearly are not accurate.

I just popped in and scrolled to the bottom to see where the thread had gone. There are extremely detailed explanations to the types of objections you have above. Off the top of my head, for instance, the uranium-thorium isotope series that we find in various rocks can create C-14 in carbon based minerals when it decays. Please look into this stuff a little bit more closely before deciding that the guy creating a webpage in his church's basement knows more about the formation of the Earth than the entire field of geology.

Hey now. The entire field of geology, with its millions of academics, thousands of journals and hundreds of millions of practical applications, clearly has an agenda.

The guy creating a webpage in his church's basement only want to tell the truth.

False. I'd elaborate but you've shown time after time that it's pointless to respond to you.

Then why do you keep showing up?