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Absolutely. There are not degrees of belief that are more or less mental than each other. Once you've crossed that line you give up all your privileges to logic and reason I'm afraid.
Not all faiths are as rigid philosophically as the Abrahamic ones. They all believe in a higher power to my knowledge, but the shape or form of that power varies.
What's even more astounding is that these people actually want to devote themselves to this kind of god and pray to him. There is personally too much in this cosmic bastard's resume for me to warm to him or trust him. Just some minor examples...
*Wiping out everything who doesn't believe in him, instead of thinking of ways to show his presence to them or to reach non believers or sinners in more productive and constructive ways that didn't involve murdering them with a flood.
*Poor Job, who he let Lucifer torture with emotional, physical and financial suffering just to prove that people loved him so much they'd accept any punishment and not lose the faith.
*Is claimed to be a loving god, but is very inconsistent in his punishments that defy such loving adjectives. It's hard to tell where he stands on the forgiveness policy too: if you commit sin you are going to burn forever in hell forever, but if you ask for forgiveness on your death bed you're clear of all charges? I'm lost here. And yet those who don't believe in God but still lead moral and upstanding lives are still sinners that can't repent until they swallow the wafer and drink the blood? Wouldn't God be nice enough to make an exception and save good people without religion from going to hell instead of dooming them to it just because they did everything moral people should do without the bible's guidance? This God seems pretty insecure.
*Is viewed as all powerful by his followers, who must then justify or explain why kids are born with cancer, why disasters are brought upon the population, why good, moral people die senselessly and all the rest of the threats to our life that there are here on earth. I've heard that the gay revolution and their seizure of marriage rights are a cause of some of the newer hurricanes, God's punishment for us having compassion, but I've not heard a Christian effectively tackle the whole "babies with cancer" issue yet. If God is all powerful, why can't he fix these problems? If he's all loving, why are these issues present at all?
Additionally, even if God created us and then abandoned us to work free from his control, what then makes the religious think that he'll remember to take the non-sinners to heaven when they die? If he was done with this species and wanted to abandon them on earth, I don't see him opening up heaven's gates for the creations he seems to think are faulty or unworthy. Personally, I don't hold much moral value in a god who abandons those he created, dooming them to the suffering he designed for them through his own negligence. Parents who abandon their kids to fend for themselves are arrested, what's God's excuse?
An important question for atheists to answer: If God was real, would you welcome him and pray for him to enter heaven?
Me? If this God acts the same as the one in the bible, I would not be joining his team and would happily accept my punishment for that decision. A cock's a cock, cosmic or otherwise.
And on a similar note: why do believers so often confuse devotion with moral?
Excellent post which can maybe move the whole debate on somewhat given that the likes of Draggers failed to even keep a copy of his earth shattering 'evidence' on a USB stick somewhere so we're never going to get to see any 'evidence' for the existence of God.
Let's ignore whether or not God exists for the moment as a moot point and address if he does exist why he is worthy of worship, love, blind devotion or even basic respect?
This is a guy who consistently gets the hump and kills people for not believing in him or worshipping him despite him being the one who created them and dictated how they would behave by the processes he set in motion.
When in the bible is he ever loving? The vast majority of his time is spent bollocking people, testing their faith by foisting various miseries on them and then punishing them when they show themselves to be fallible little humans and not perfect like him.
Just take Adam and Eve. Creates a nice enjoyable paradise and everything is fine. But because he doesn't trust them (even though he must know exactly how they will act in any given circumstances) or maybe just because he was bored he sends down the devil (in the guise of our old chum the talking snake!!) to test their loyalty to him. And then when they fail the test he throws his toys out of the pram and says 'Right bollocks to the pair of you then. I'm shutting down Eden and you, man, can go out and graft for a living whilst you, woman, I've just made childbirth be agonisingly painful to serve you right. That'll learn the pair of you not to piss me about.'
What an all merciful and loving chap he really is. Why not just practice what his son preaches and just turn the other cheek and forgive Adam and Eve? Then we could all still be happily wandering round the Garden of Eden in the buff, living in peace and enjoying the fruit (apart from the apples - don't touch them or he will go proper mental).
They ignore the evidence and advice and have a misplaced faith that this will be the last time, "he really does love me", "other people don't understand", "he means well", "we can make it work", etc etc,
Either they destroy their whole lives in devotion to the bully or , eventually, the reality does hit them but they realise they have waisted a big chunk of their lives.
The relationship between God and the worshipper is really and abusive and broken one.
Oh and again: even believing the story is true, nothing in it says that human condition brought up by the Fall of Man warrants salvation. So there's no need of midichlorians.. herr, I mean Jesus.
I mean, really, given what we know of him or what his followers view him as, what's the big deal with this cosmic crackpot in the clouds? What's his motive, his game, the whole reason for creating us? If he made life on earth, are we led to believe that he'd gotten really bored up until that point in that vacant cosmic vortex of silence and decided to create some toys to play with just to pass the time? Because if he fast tracked the formation of the planet in just a week he must have really wanted to get to the fun stuff, toying with us, giving us cancer to see how our cells reacted, causing natural disasters to see how the geography he crafted adapted to the winds, waters and fires, and created "tests" for his children to analyze how emotion, urges and thought drove their actions. At best God is an overzealous psychologist fascinated with the minds of those he created who gets off on challenging them with horrors and misery to test their faith, and at worst he's just a god equivalent of a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass...just because. Either option points to an unsettled and insecure person who demands worship or power and is willing to go to great lengths to achieve both.
If God made all of us, you're right to point out that he really screwed up by not simply programming us how he wanted us to act. If he gets so pissed off when his creations like Adam and Eve or Noah's people don't listen to him, why engineer a flaw in the human blueprint to allow for temptation or free will of any kind? I hate to pick a fight with someone who could send me to hell for the trouble, but the blame falls chiefly with God. He can't care about giving us free will, since he demands our faith with hell as a punishment for practicing that free will, and yet even as a maniacal creator he can't be so stupid that he can't see the inherent flaw in giving people temptation, sexual desires tied to biological procreation, lust and greed while surrounding those people with things that massage those very urges into troubling habits.
If heaven is a factory and we're the product, I dare say that the workers would call up to God's office and demand that the prototype models be recalled.
"Why do you demand I recall my creations, you subhumans?" God would bark at his employees shuffling up and down the conveyor belts.
"Because, oh master, your creations are down on earth screwing anything not nailed down, gambling their fortunes away, murdering senselessly and praying to other Gods!"
"But why?" God would ask, dumbfounded.
"Because, oh master, you gave them urges with which to commit adultery, gave them avarice with which to spur gambling, plagued them with ill tempers that brew hot heads and have not shown yourself to them in your full glory, leading them to create other gods in competition with you!"
"That's...horrid," God would say, shadowing his face with a hand that massaged his tense forehead. "Recall the humans, I must fix that last defect!"
Because I'm just not understanding why this God would allow for these defects to persist unless he was toying with us. If he was loving he'd help get rid of our urges and what makes us act out, understanding that he was the one that put those defects in place to start with and that it wasn't our fault we acted as he set us up to act. That he hasn't is telling, as is the fact that he still makes us go to hell for acting in our nature as devised by him. I mean, what does he expect us to do? If you make creations with a biological need to procreate and a horniness spurred by hormones, then make sex feel ecstatic on top of it, you are creating your own problems just as you are for making winning at cards feel like a drug or manufacturing poverty that persists crime.
If God just made us as he wanted us to act then he'd have a population that masturbated (metaphorically of course, real jerking is sinful) to him with their prayers and hymns day and night and devoted all their energy to stroking his universe sized ego, because ego is what this has to be down to. God has to be told he is loved, that he's amazing, and if you don't fall in line with that worshipping viewpoint it's off with you. Look at how he treats the best of us, like Job, just to prove he's loved? Imagine his view of those he hates for not believing in him, and what he'd allow Lucifer to do to those people for not loving him that much? He should appoint us as his spiritual advisers, since I'm confident we could help him achieve his true motives and finally be honest with himself and his engineering plans. Yes, there's little logic or consistency in what God does or expects from his creations. Which is why his followers can only go on TV and repeat stupid diversionary statements like, "He works in mysterious ways," or, "we're only human, we can't understand God's plan," and all the other hogwash they use to avoid actually admitting how nonsensical and balmy it all is. They can't cope with the idea that God is monstrous, so he has to be working above their understanding, in ways they just can't comprehend. Which is pretty hilarious, since they count the bible as a text that does exactly that: helps them understand what God wants and his aims for us on this earth.
They are perfectly able to understand and comprehend God's expectations and motivations when it's in their favor, like their assurance that God will take them to heaven and has a grand plan for them, but when they're asked to explain things that poke holes in their worship of him, like the baby cancer, natural disasters, or even the very cruel things he does in the bible itself that are plain to see, they play dumb and feign wonder at the mysteries of God. How very amusing, like a kid trapped while running inside a revolving door. If they just slowed down and thought on their predicament they'd be able to escape, but refuse because they've been programmed to run full speed. Might I just say that there's something inherently quaint and endearing about a God who is cartoonishly and excessively British? If Draggers can prove that he really talks like this (maybe that was part of his massive evidence dump on January 30th that's now lost to the wind) I'm on Team Overload for life!
I feel bad for the religious who are both being battered by their partners and their God, because they're doubly screwed: they can't escape the beatings at home because of their own psychological shortfalls and because of the battering they get at church and from the bible they are told they can't divorce from the abuser. @Ludovico, since Disney are currently releasing a third wave of Star Wars films to cash in on the brand with more meddling in the mythology, can we also expect a third rendition on the God myth in the coming years from God's modern disciples? "The Newer Testament," God's holy orders for the 21st century express from the A team of today's Christians: Frank, Bill, Henry, Joe, Carl and Larry? I expect Draggers will want in on this too, and because he's a writer he's perfectly suited to such a task. ;)
"Jesus's Twelve" a decent heist movie?
And Then There Were Ten Commandments, could be a fun murder mystery of sorts!
I'd love it if Mel Gibson actually made this
Ooh, a heist film, I like it.
Jesus must assemble all his disciples to free Mary Magdalen and his tramp friends when the Romans lock them up for indecency in the land's most fortified prison. Without hope and nary a prayer, how can our savior rescue those that give his later sacrifice meaning?
But let's be real, lads. We're in the age of the reboot and prequel so how about a film about Jesus' lost years? It'd be amusing just to see all the Christians up in arms about a filmmaker claiming to know how Jesus spent his younger years (speaking for God and tarnishing the sacred bible?!), sparking protests that the studio financing the film could use to market it and get those butts in seats.
No need to be scared any more that we're going to ask for some evidence. We've moved on from that as we know despite some bold claims you simply ain't going to deliver it.
What we're asking now is - let's assume God does exist; why do you consider him to be worthy of respect?
I also don't think that Occam's Razor applies so easily to the nature of why we're here and how the earth came about, either. In all actuality it's anything but simple or the simplest explanation behind causation to argue that a cosmic being who knows all and does all created what we see, created us with a special plan for us on this planet, and is someone who we must pray to for further riches and a trip to heaven. It's far simpler to argue for the creation of earth due to a big bang and an explosion that created matter, given we have stardust in us currently and scientists have actually complied data to support such claims.
I don't think the God explanation can come about unless one is uneducated on the nature of things in our world, which was the case for the people who wrote the bible and why we're all here debating it (the bastards!); they had not a sliver of the idea about things we do now. So Christians are following the world of a book thousands of years old written by ancestors who were so ignorant of the nature of the universe that they concluded that a cosmic god created the earth and them along with it in just a week. I think the weakness of those conclusions stand on their own.
evidence for this? some of his designs are just stupid.
I think the argument, "God is beyond our understanding" is simply thrown out when the religious are intellectually cornered (which is a lot, as one can imagine) and have nothing else to say. I don't understand how the religious are confidently able to understand God when it comes to their apparently guaranteed trip to heaven (they have a selfish interest in being assured of it), how he created our planet and us, what he has planned for us in this life and everything else they deem fact about the almighty...but they are still happy to cherry pick what they don't understand-or are unable to understand-when it suits their weakening arguments.
So what I graft from the religious is this: they perfectly understand God when it means great things for them, but are absolutely lost for an answer when God's morality or existence is endangered by another's argument. They have to play games and do their mental gymnastics to save face, but also to protect the credibility of the beliefs they've chained themselves to. I mean, you yourself claim that God is "obviously" superior to our minds and understanding, a bold claim for a human to make who is trying to argue that we can't know all about God. So you must really understand him, the thing you're arguing that we can't do as feeble minded humans. Kind of lost here. We don't even need that to pass judgement on God. Let us only look at the actions he himself perpetuates, as can be read in the bible that the religious hold as a totem of fact. Regardless of what God does to me, I can see the games he played with Adam and Eve, the cruelty he allowed Lucifer to bring on Job and the very insecure way he wiped out those who didn't believe him during Noah's time (is that really a crime to him, to have a different opinion on the existence of a deity?) and other actions that are questionable without even getting into what you suggest. Just considering those, he not only deserves zero respect, but no further notice on top of that as any kind of moral authority. To take the bible at its word is to view God as monstrous.
But if there is great unhappiness like natural disasters or disease in the world and the religious are bold enough to claim that God has caused these things-like the hurricanes some say he brought us for giving gays more rights-then we can use their arguments against them, hold God accountable and judge him for the merits of his actions on that front.
The religious love to hold God responsible for all the good things that happen, like the sick patients saved by doctors who work hard at school for years to relieve them of cancer, or the random prayers that get answered due to probability and lucky odds, but they aren't willing to hold him accountable for all the bad things that happen, just as they don't like to admit the things they don't understand about God that make him seem cruel or non-existent. You can either hold God fully accountable or not accountable at all, but you can't cherry pick. If he's as all-powerful and all-knowing as they love to claim when the good things happen, they also have to be prepared to answer why he's absent from the stage when bad things need to be stopped.
But this is all theoretical, of course. I'm in fact open to the idea that there is no god.
As I said, I'm talking about god as a general concept, not the biblical god. I don't believe the bible stories are literally true.
I agree.
Any woman on the forum (or men for that matter) who think that the methodolgy for human child birth is an intelligent one? We have already discussed the horrendous figures re deaths of babies within human history. Much of this is down to "Gods poor design."
My first son had to be pulled out with something that looked like a sink plunger!! (mother and child would be dead in the middle ages) and my 2nd cousin almost died last week giving birth. Only the fantastic skills and tech at St Thomas's in London saved her and the baby. (again, both dead in the middle ages). Human birth is the Reliant Robin of human design: it just stinks!!
Once you worship a God, he seems to be given a hell of a lot of slack. God maybe perfectly happy with his patented human childbirth method but, if he is, I refer back to my original observation that he, then, has no great brain. He has no right to be happy with his work in this area. It should never have got off God's drawing board.
PS: Feel free to explain the cleverness of child cancer?
ok lets go through this AGAIN because lord knows we have gone through these same arguments just different ways
ANYWAYS
1. Show me one passage in the bible that says "thou shalt not do science" or "Thou shall not discover the mysteries of the universe" literally show me one passage from Genesis to revelation that says science is against god or religion. Can't wait to see Wizard and others actually trying to find a passage
2. LUD you want evidence I have given you enough Archealogical evidence to win any court case period and you want more fair enough go read the case for Christ by former atheist Lee Strobel. (quick side note had this forum been around pre Lee's conversion in 1979 he would be worse then wizard on here no joke) I'll spoil the book for those who don't want to read it
THERE IS MORE THEN ENOUGH EVIDENCE THAT CHRIST'S RESSURECTION HAPPENED EXACTLY AS IT WAS DESCRIBED IN MATTHEW MARK LUKE AND JOHN AND DUE TO THAT NOT ONLY DOES THE SON OF GOD EXIST BUT SO DOES THE FATHER
Maybe I will try Lud's Approach Wizard Lud PAtb show me a way past the empty tomb show me how Jesus died and didn't rise again from the dead please give me your account of what "really" transpired easter morning. you all are men of science or so you claim so what happened
3. describing the new testament as fan fiction is pathetic
https://jewsforjesus.org/answers/top-40-most-helpful-messianic-prophecies/
jesus is the fuffilment of every promis god mad in the old testament.
I suppose the caps makes the evidence stronger. As with some previous posts, I really dont know of this is a genuine post, it is so far from reality.
"Maybe I will try Lud's Approach Wizard Lud PAtb show me a way past the empty tomb show me how Jesus died and didn't rise again from the dead please give me your account of what "really" transpired easter morning. you all are men of science or so you claim so what happened"
Show me how I don't have an invisible pink dragon in my garage!! I'm still waiting for anyone to disprove this.
Show me any passage in the Bible that says the dragon does not exist...one passage.
There is more than enough evidence of my dragon! You claim to be men of science so please come up with the evidence to show there is no dragon. I'm waiting....................
And I havn't even started on the fairies at number 17, two doors down.
I think the against science aspect is mainly down to what we've learnt about evolution and prehistoric times being contradicted by the bible. I think you can be religious/spiritual without taking it all so literally and believing every single word of the bible (a book written thousands of years ago in a much less enlightened civilised world), and ranting and raving in caps isn't going to help your case.
Since you genuinely seem to believe in every aspect of Christianity I'm curious about what your stance on other religions is. I asked this a few pages ago but do you think they're different beliefs and stories based on the same God or do you think Islam and the rest are just wrong? Because to me, without getting into any other side of it, none are more believeable than the other imo, and I'd like to know how you'd justify that.