Originally Posted By Thoughts
However, I don’t know that I entirely agree with the point of tyrannical rule (Nazism, Communism, etc.) being a new religion. The pursuit of power has long been ingrained in human history, and the statement that trying to become “God-like” making it a religion isn’t strong in my mind. That is quite against what is found in most religions; attempting to become God is (more than) frowned upon in much of what I’ve heard of. If this isn’t what you meant, please clarify!

Of course this will be frowned upon by established religions – new religions always are! That doesn’t mean they aren’t religions, however, or that people don’t try to make themselves Gods.

Finally, be careful with using direct articles (“the”) rather than indirect articles (“a”).

And religion being the source of problems is undeniable to any reasonable person, no matter how religious they might be.

Do you mean to say that religion is the sole source of problems on the planet? I’m assuming not, but if so, that will be room for further discussion in the next response.

English isn’t my first language, but I know enough to know that saying something is the source of problems is not the same as saying it’s the only source of problems – that is not what I meant at all.

Also, be careful with this “hard evidence” business. Let me know when you figure out from current science that there is no potential for a God to exist.

Once again, that isn’t what I said. Science cannot disprove the existence of God, just as it cannot disprove the existence of anything else – that’s not what science does. I just said that there isn’t any hard, scientifically valid evidence for the existence of God, which is absolutely true.

3.) You can’t possibly weigh this with absolute certainty. To say religion is absolutely detrimental is to say you know exactly every positive and negative contribution to this world that religion has made. That’s quite the claim.

Will I deny that the wars are absolutely awful and detrimental? Absolutely not. But I’m also not going to claim that I know whether religion has provided overall positive or negative contributions to society from a standpoint of “hard evidence.” Hell, I don’t even think I could define explicitly what “positive” or “negative” contributions are in a black and white fashion!

Yet again, I never made such a claim. I never said religion was absolutely detrimental, but the fact that it has had a lot of detrimental effects on society (such as war) is undeniable.

Also, if you have proven that morality is explicitly differentiable from God, go get this published! I’m sure plenty of people would be interested to see it. I’m still at a bit of a loss for where exactly this happens… because you think that morality has evolved since biblical times? By what standard? If its based on what’s societally accepted, I don’t think that’s adequate support.

It is self-evident – people pick and choose from the Bible which morals they want to follow, which means their morals must actually come from somewhere other than the Bible. And yet again, slavery is a blatant example of how our morals have evolved since Biblical times – the Bible advocates it, but we now consider it abhorrent. And that’s just one example.

4.) Note the use of the word “generally” in my claim. The Ten Commandments are not the majority of the Bible. Most of the teachings are through stories, etc. Also, this point was in response to:

Then there’s all the stuff that should be in the ten commandments but isn’t. A good example of this is how there is a commandment saying we should honour our parents, but there isn’t anything saying we shouldn’t commit child abuse, or even pedophilia…

I was saying though this isn’t in the Ten Commandments, I think it is seen elsewhere. I know the SAB disagrees, but we can talk about interpretations elsewhere if desired.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that: the Bible doesn’t forbid child abuse or pedophilia anywhere. The onus is on you to demonstrate otherwise.

Let me pull up something quickly, to make sure we’re on the same page:

Demonstrably (adj.) – 1 : capable of being demonstrated

Please demonstrate! If it’s as demonstrable as you are claiming, it shouldn’t take much. You have claimed God to be a genocidal creature, (note also: “death” often means punishment in the sense of being sent to Hell; i.e. death of the soul, not necessarily dying in human/flesh form) but to do so you first must determine these “deaths” to be unjustified. Is life in prison murder? If so, then I’d say our justice system is genocidal, and not exactly as evolved as you claim. Assuming a finite existence, as you believe, this is banishment for the extent to which a person experiences time. In the case of religion, infinite existence (in some form) is asserted, and God punishes people for crime against his absolute moral standard, and the resulting “death” is a sort of supernatural lifetime in prison. Analogous? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

So to kill every living creature on earth except those on the ark – even though the vast majority of them would obviously have been perfectly innocent – is not the greatest act of genocide ever conceived? And that’s just God’s first killing! If you cannot agree that this is the act of the greatest genocidal maniac imaginable – hence an utterly morally reprehensible being – then you are so blinded by your religious belief that you cannot be reasoned with objectively and rationally.

Also, noting such things as God being jealous, this is again putting his tendencies in relative terms to human understanding; this is part of the interpretation-based nature of the Bible. Comparing our moral responsibilities (imperfect) to that of a perfect being doesn’t check out. Jealousy in our sense is coveting the tangible and irrelevant; God’s jealousy is coveting the perfection of humans: desiring morality itself. Our jealousy is devoting our soul to that which is not moral (anything that is not God), where God’s is desiring us to desire what is right. Does that make sense? That’s how I look at it.

What a pathetic cop-out! Can’t you see how desperately you are twisting logic here? God’s morality ought to be beyond reproach, and the being that created everything shouldn’t even be capable of jealousy. He even literally says he is a jealous God, which is something no real God would ever say.

Bold move in asserting what God would or wouldn’t do. C’mon Sachiko, you’re not unintelligent. “Coveting thy neighbor’s ass” is hard to translate into yearning for that which your neighbor has? Jealousy of what others possess? That lesson made plenty of sense to me in elementary school; as a matter of fact, I could have figured out what that meant on my own. I know you don’t find this cryptic. Of course we don’t have donkeys as a point of jealousy (at least most of us…), but does that really deter from the lesson involved?

Antiquated references aren’t a problem if the message still gets across! As for your citations, we can discuss those specifically in another post, maybe? I’m not dodging (I do want to make sure I read them all thoroughly), but even I am getting tired of my own words at this point )

You are completely missing the point. The fact is, if God wrote the ten commandments, he would have said “do not be jealous of the possessions of others” or something like that – he would have written for everyone, for all time. The fact that it uses such specific and antiquated references shows it wasn’t written by God, but it’s exactly what you would expect bronze age humans to write. So it was obviously written by humans at that time, not by God.

9.) Where did I lie?? I’d love to know.

I found your claim of being expert in physics very difficult to believe, as anyone with any knowledge of physics knows that Noah’s ark is physically impossible, or seeing the entire world from the top of a mountain, or many, many other things in the Bible. However, I now see that you simply allow your faith to completely override your logic and knowledge.

Here’s the problem: to assert that what happened was impossible is to assume your conclusion. You don’t believe these things are possible because you believe in the physical limitations of this planet, defined by an assumption that there is nothing else. Here is your proof:

There is nothing beyond the laws of physics (supernatural) => (implies) these biblical events are impossible => There is no God.

^^ The first step is the problem. Your assumption is that there is no supernatural being (God) that would make this possible. You have assumed your conclusion.

Once again, what a cop-out! Once you start talking about the supernatural, you aren’t talking about physics, and it becomes meaningless talk about the possible and impossible, as anything becomes possible. This makes trying to determine the facts irrelevant – when there aren’t any rules, there isn’t any way to establish right and wrong. Obviously, when I’m talking about what’s possible, I’m talking about the real world!

My response might as well end here: you are admitting God requires the supernatural to be possible, and as a rationalist, I simply do not accept the existence of the supernatural until proven otherwise.

To get you started, please read and gain an understanding of the Planck Scale/Time. Hyperphysics (online physics database) has a friendly description if you search Planck Time in Google. It is the fourth result.

The unit is named after Max Planck, and uses hbar (planck’s constant (h)/(2*pi)), the speed of light, and the Gravitational constant as parameters. Prior to this time (big bang->planck time), the laws of physics do not apply. At all. In fact, we know nothing of this time, nor can we as defined by physics. It requires a unified force; we don’t even have a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) worked out yet, let alone anything that can be used to describe a single, unified force. Go ahead and read about string theory and SUSY as much as you’d like, you’re not going to find the answer.

In addition to this lack of a point of origin (initial condition), we don’t have any way of probing this scale in real time. We can’t do it. Not only is technology not there (actually, I believe a factor of over 10^20 away from measuring this short of a time scale), but even if we had that technology, the physics wouldn’t tell us anything, since the laws don’t apply. This gives us a time-averaged reality.

I don’t know your experience with differential equations, specifically chaotic systems is, but ask anyone doing research in the field of complex systems how they feel about using perturbation techniques (or any other analysis methods) on a chaotic system of essentially infinite variables (our universe) without a point of origin where our data is time-averaged. I doubt their face will show much excitement.

Funny how all of our “hard evidence” stops right at the point at which you would have the best shot at seeing God’s hands, huh (the beginning and/or the instantaneous)?

This concrete enough to get you started? The above is a little example of some of the stuff I’ve been grinding about in my head. Not quite faith-based, blind conclusions, huh?

None of this proves anything one way or the other in relation to God or anything in my article at all.

My hope is that you can read this, see the logic within, and understand that this is something I struggle with and grapple with every day of my life. However, there is also something that draws me to a certainty it is true; something beyond a desire to think that there is life beyond this one. By no means is this a psychological security blanket for me… the number of intellectual headaches this has caused for me is ridiculous. However, this is where I see the spiritual aspect of the religion paired with the faith in the existence. I can’t prove God does exist, but I know you can’t prove he doesn’t as well. And that appears to be more of a problem for those believing purely in “hard evidence.”

So it comes back to the same thing it always does – faith. You have irrational faith, I don’t. That’s it. If you can free yourself of it as I have, your intellectual headaches will all instantly disappear, and everything will make perfect, logical sense. If you want to convince me or any other rational person, logic demands that the onus is on you to prove that God does exist – not the other way around.

I look forward to your response, and hope it will be in better feelings this time.

I sincerely hope your next post will be a little more concise.

1.) I apologize for the way I started the last post. If I want anyone to listen to my thoughts with an open mind, immediately degrading their thought processes is both detrimental to my goal and rude to the person expressing their opinion. Pretty ironic to conclude with “feel free to express your opinions” when I begin with insulting them, eh? Sorry.

2.) There are a few things that I misinterpreted in your claims. I will try to make clear how that happened by citing the sections specifically that I misunderstood your words. I’m not here to twist words (at least not intentionally)! Again, this isn’t a win or lose argument. Honestly, I doubt that’s possible… if it is, I think the question of religion would have been solved long ago.

I love the thought processes involved with this, and my understanding of life changes (and hopefully grows) each day through challenges and discussions such as these. For this, I thank you; your response was prompt and organized.

I’d hate to think how long your message would be if you did have time!

Ha! Well played… I ended up alt+tabbing to this as I was doing something else, so I got most of my thoughts in. If that wasn’t the case, I feel like I’d have to send you a book or something .

Now to the fun stuff!

I’ll begin numbering again with responses according to your points, beginning with the atheism/evil point :

1.) Misinterpreted by me. The first few parts of your second paragraph gave me indication that you believed that the religious thought the atheists to be the source of evil… pure evil may have been a bit overboard. Still, I haven’t heard much on the religious claiming tyrannical rule being directly correlated to atheism.

However, I don’t know that I entirely agree with the point of tyrannical rule (Nazism, Communism, etc.) being a new religion. The pursuit of power has long been ingrained in human history, and the statement that trying to become “God-like” making it a religion isn’t strong in my mind. That is quite against what is found in most religions; attempting to become God is (more than) frowned upon in much of what I’ve heard of. If this isn’t what you meant, please clarify!

Finally, be careful with using direct articles (“the”) rather than indirect articles (“a”).

And religion being the source of problems is undeniable to any reasonable person, no matter how religious they might be.

Do you mean to say that religion is the sole source of problems on the planet? I’m assuming not, but if so, that will be room for further discussion in the next response.

2.) This is what made me think of the next point:

If the majority of the population were naturally inclined to always question what their leaders tell them, then how would the dogma of Nazism, communism etc. have ever become established in the first place? That, in essence, is what atheism actually is: it is not accepting what we are told on the basis of faith, but rather – and only – on the basis of hard evidence.

That’s where I thought you claimed it wasn’t atheism because they didn’t question… I know now that’s not what you meant, but I hope it’s at least visible to you how that could have looked that way.

Also, be careful with this “hard evidence” business. Let me know when you figure out from current science that there is no potential for a God to exist.

3.) You can’t possibly weigh this with absolute certainty. To say religion is absolutely detrimental is to say you know exactly every positive and negative contribution to this world that religion has made. That’s quite the claim.

Will I deny that the wars are absolutely awful and detrimental? Absolutely not. But I’m also not going to claim that I know whether religion has provided overall positive or negative contributions to society from a standpoint of “hard evidence.” Hell, I don’t even think I could define explicitly what “positive” or “negative” contributions are in a black and white fashion!

Also, if you have proven that morality is explicitly differentiable from God, go get this published! I’m sure plenty of people would be interested to see it. I’m still at a bit of a loss for where exactly this happens… because you think that morality has evolved since biblical times? By what standard? If its based on what’s societally accepted, I don’t think that’s adequate support.

4.) Note the use of the word “generally” in my claim. The Ten Commandments are not the majority of the Bible. Most of the teachings are through stories, etc. Also, this point was in response to:

Then there’s all the stuff that should be in the ten commandments but isn’t. A good example of this is how there is a commandment saying we should honour our parents, but there isn’t anything saying we shouldn’t commit child abuse, or even pedophilia…

I was saying though this isn’t in the Ten Commandments, I think it is seen elsewhere. I know the SAB disagrees, but we can talk about interpretations elsewhere if desired.

5.) This was in response to the examples you used of the religious doing detrimental things throughout your article… maybe it was meant to be a statement on the effect of large-scale religion on people, and not the religious people themselves? Though I think there must be a correlation.

6.)

It’s hard to know where to begin when dealing with such twisted logic. Basically, I am saying your original assumption is demonstrably false, which makes your entire argument utterly meaningless.

Let me pull up something quickly, to make sure we’re on the same page:

Demonstrably (adj.) – 1 : capable of being demonstrated

Please demonstrate! If it’s as demonstrable as you are claiming, it shouldn’t take much. You have claimed God to be a genocidal creature, (note also: “death” often means punishment in the sense of being sent to Hell; i.e. death of the soul, not necessarily dying in human/flesh form) but to do so you first must determine these “deaths” to be unjustified. Is life in prison murder? If so, then I’d say our justice system is genocidal, and not exactly as evolved as you claim. Assuming a finite existence, as you believe, this is banishment for the extent to which a person experiences time. In the case of religion, infinite existence (in some form) is asserted, and God punishes people for crime against his absolute moral standard, and the resulting “death” is a sort of supernatural lifetime in prison. Analogous? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Also, noting such things as God being jealous, this is again putting his tendencies in relative terms to human understanding; this is part of the interpretation-based nature of the Bible. Comparing our moral responsibilities (imperfect) to that of a perfect being doesn’t check out. Jealousy in our sense is coveting the tangible and irrelevant; God’s jealousy is coveting the perfection of humans: desiring morality itself. Our jealousy is devoting our soul to that which is not moral (anything that is not God), where God’s is desiring us to desire what is right. Does that make sense? That’s how I look at it.

7.)

Yet again, that’s not what I said at all. Plus I provide several citations… If God actually did write them, there wouldn’t be references to coveting thy neighbour’s ass or how to treat slaves, and there would have been stuff forbidding slavery, rape and child abuse, for example.

Bold move in asserting what God would or wouldn’t do. C’mon Sachiko, you’re not unintelligent. “Coveting thy neighbor’s ass” is hard to translate into yearning for that which your neighbor has? Jealousy of what others possess? That lesson made plenty of sense to me in elementary school; as a matter of fact, I could have figured out what that meant on my own. I know you don’t find this cryptic. Of course we don’t have donkeys as a point of jealousy (at least most of us…), but does that really deter from the lesson involved?

Antiquated references aren’t a problem if the message still gets across! As for your citations, we can discuss those specifically in another post, maybe? I’m not dodging (I do want to make sure I read them all thoroughly), but even I am getting tired of my own words at this point )

8.) Apparently I misinterpreted. Maybe there are those that dismiss the Old Testament, and I see your point. It is quite the contradiction to hold an “absolute standard” yet disregard a lot of it… that doesn’t mean there’s not room for interpretation on it, though. I do see your point on this measure, however, for those who disregard what they don’t enjoy within the Bible- this IS synthesizing a God, and thereby destroying that person’s evidence for one. I think we can agree on that!

9.) Where did I lie?? I’d love to know.

Here’s the problem: to assert that what happened was impossible is to assume your conclusion. You don’t believe these things are possible because you believe in the physical limitations of this planet, defined by an assumption that there is nothing else. Here is your proof:

There is nothing beyond the laws of physics (supernatural) => (implies) these biblical events are impossible => There is no God.

^^ The first step is the problem. Your assumption is that there is no supernatural being (God) that would make this possible. You have assumed your conclusion.

Simply talking about logical arguments and supporting them with evidence doesn’t make it so – you have to actually do it. Clearly your approach to logic and evidence is nothing but a matter of faith.

Well put. Until you prove the assertion above (“hard evidence” please?), you are doing just what your first sentence describes. Also, using the word “clearly” consistently without providing evidence is a similar concept.

To get you started, please read and gain an understanding of the Planck Scale/Time. Hyperphysics (online physics database) has a friendly description if you search Planck Time in Google. It is the fourth result.

The unit is named after Max Planck, and uses hbar (planck’s constant (h)/(2*pi)), the speed of light, and the Gravitational constant as parameters. Prior to this time (big bang->planck time), the laws of physics do not apply. At all. In fact, we know nothing of this time, nor can we as defined by physics. It requires a unified force; we don’t even have a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) worked out yet, let alone anything that can be used to describe a single, unified force. Go ahead and read about string theory and SUSY as much as you’d like, you’re not going to find the answer.

In addition to this lack of a point of origin (initial condition), we don’t have any way of probing this scale in real time. We can’t do it. Not only is technology not there (actually, I believe a factor of over 10^20 away from measuring this short of a time scale), but even if we had that technology, the physics wouldn’t tell us anything, since the laws don’t apply. This gives us a time-averaged reality.

I don’t know your experience with differential equations, specifically chaotic systems is, but ask anyone doing research in the field of complex systems how they feel about using perturbation techniques (or any other analysis methods) on a chaotic system of essentially infinite variables (our universe) without a point of origin where our data is time-averaged. I doubt their face will show much excitement.

Funny how all of our “hard evidence” stops right at the point at which you would have the best shot at seeing God’s hands, huh (the beginning and/or the instantaneous)?

This concrete enough to get you started? The above is a little example of some of the stuff I’ve been grinding about in my head. Not quite faith-based, blind conclusions, huh?

I apologize for the misunderstandings in my first post. They were genuine, not attempts to ignore your message and promote my own thoughts. However, I have genuinely tried to understand your thoughts better, and more explicitly address my own opinions on similar issues. Your thoughts on why some of the eastern societies were more prone to tyrannical leadership were very interesting… though tough to prove (again, ridiculous numbers of variables), they certainly seem like reasonable contributors to the issue. I have also tried to be less of an ass regarding your opinions in this post

My hope is that you can read this, see the logic within, and understand that this is something I struggle with and grapple with every day of my life. However, there is also something that draws me to a certainty it is true; something beyond a desire to think that there is life beyond this one. By no means is this a psychological security blanket for me… the number of intellectual headaches this has caused for me is ridiculous. However, this is where I see the spiritual aspect of the religion paired with the faith in the existence. I can’t prove God does exist, but I know you can’t prove he doesn’t as well. And that appears to be more of a problem for those believing purely in “hard evidence.”

I look forward to your response, and hope it will be in better feelings this time.

Originally Posted By Thoughts
Though I respect people posting their opinions (and the opinions themselves), I do not endorse conclusions drawn off of poor logic.

Then why do you do exactly that in your message?

Quite frankly, I don’t have time in this sitting to go sentence by sentence throughout the first few paragraphs to weed out all of the illegitimate conclusions drawn, but here are some points:

I’d hate to think how long your message would be if you did have time!

1.) Your assumption that religious folks claim atheism is the pure source of evil is something I’ve never heard, read, or even considered before. Ironically, my first exposure to such a concept is from an atheist. By no means is this the case (as you have discussed), but claiming religion to be the source of problems explicitly is pretty outlandish as well.

Did you actually read my article? I didn’t say that about atheism all. And religion being the source of problems is undeniable to any reasonable person, no matter how religious they might be.

2.) Dismissing atheistic views in situations such as the Holocaust because people didn’t adequately question their leaders is ridiculous. Atheism is directly in respect to spirituality, not societal authorities. There may be ties, but the implicit correlation is just not there. Ironically, it would take a bold leap of faith to follow your conclusion, as the logical evidence plainly doesn’t follow.

Once again, did you actually read my article? I didn’t say that either.

3.) To claim religion is detrimental because of war is to ignore an immeasurable positive side to religion: the contribution of moral structure to societies today. Note immeasurable. It is impossible to say exactly how much religion has affected the moral system within society as well as the justice system. However, I can tell you that it has been damn significant. Note that this is relevant to both the religious and the atheistic.

The idea that religion may have had some positive effects on human society does not negate in the slightest that its proven propensity to causing war is extremely detrimental to human society – no reasonable person could argue otherwise. And as my article shows, our morality clearly does not come from religion, so most of the good things that appear to have come from religion didn’t really come from religion at all, but from own innate morality.

4.) The Bible is not a rulebook That’s the whole point, actually. The purpose of stories in that sense is to allow for people to draw on the teachings through situations, not explicit rules. Because things are not generally black and white, the Bible does not generally lay out black and white rules. This allows for translation into today’s lifestyle. Clever, huh?

So the ten commandments are not a set of rules that human beings are supposed to follow? And once again, what does this have to do with my article?

5.) Dismissing religion due to those who are immoral practicing such religions is not adequate. Religious or not, humans are imperfect. Period. In fact, it is a complete contradiction to say that religion can’t exist due to the immorality of the religious yet to dismiss atheism’s inclusion in regimes such as Hitler’s because they didn’t question him and therefore couldn’t be atheist. Nice try.

Once again, I didn’t say this at all either. Did you even try to read my article?

6.) Putting God as the most immoral being in existence also doesn’t work within the scope of religion, and therefore cannot be a point of dismissal from religion. Religion assumes the existence of God, then assumes God as the absolute moral standard. Thus human actions that threaten the purity of the moral standard require banishment (hell) or purification (Jesus, in the case of the Bible). The choice is that of the human, not of God at that point. That’s like calling the concept of quarantining a terminally diseased patient murder because they weren’t allowed to resume life among the others they would ruin.

It’s hard to know where to begin when dealing with such twisted logic. Basically, I am saying your original assumption is demonstrably false, which makes your entire argument utterly meaningless.

7.) Quote: “The ten commandments clearly are not the word of any God, but rather those of a particular group of people at a very specific time and place.” Because you found things you didn’t see how to relate to? Because it seemed outdated? Not even close to adequate justification of this statement. Again, there is irony in that by you claiming this you are asserting that you KNOW the inner workings of a God, and therefore giving the notion that you believe they/it exist(s)/ You gave zero evidence to even come near concluding this. Assertions like this dismiss the validity of your entire article.

Your words in that section paraphrased:

Examples of humans (note: HUMANS, not God) doing bad things, one funny quote that shows that the language has changed => (that means implies in the logical/mathematical world) there is “clearly” no God.

Nice try.

Yet again, that’s not what I said at all. Plus I provide several citations from the Bible to support my contention that the the ten commandments were clearly written by a specific people at a specific time and a specific place, and not by any God. (You might also want to watch my recent series of Bible readings from the ten commandments for more evidence of this.) If they were written by God, they wouldn’t have so many antiquated references (as he would have written for all time), and the moral code wouldn’t have been so specifically geared toward that time and place and people (as once again, God would have universal morals that applied to everyone everywhere for all eternity). If God actually did write them, there wouldn’t be references to coveting thy neighbour’s ass or how to treat slaves, and there would have been stuff forbidding slavery, rape and child abuse, for example.

8.) Your conclusions are drawn off of evidence unsupported (things I mentioned above), and the statement that Christians ignore the Old Testament? False. Did Jesus change things? Yes. Did we toss the Old Testament? No.

Once again, did you actually read what I wrote? I am saying that – even though some Christians try to make the excuse that they ignore the Old Testament – they don’t ignore it, and nor does Jesus.

9.) Show me the plethora of events from the Bible that are demonstrably impossible. My area of study: Physics. Don’t try to fluff me on this one.

Yeah right! I’m always amused by how willing people like you are to lie to support your beliefs. If you were really confident in your beliefs, you wouldn’t have to lie to support them.

If you actually were a physicist, you’d know that the Bible is riddled with the physically impossible. How about Noah’s ark? The fact that it took God nearly a week to create the earth and everything on it, but he was able to create all the billions upon billion of stars and moons and other planets in just one day? Or the fact that Satan was able to show Jesus the entire world from the top of a mountain?

Always express your opinions, but take the time to think as you do. Support your conclusions. Be receptive to criticism. There are valid points in this discussion (i.e. that our existence is adequate evidence for God’s existence in the purely probabilistic sense… it is quite bold (stupid) to claim a full understanding of the number of events that have occurred in this universe). However, if you are going to target intellectuals and attempt to use logic, make sure that the conclusions are actually drawn from the data, and that gaps aren’t being jumped.

You might want to try following your own advice. You might also want to try actually reading what I wrote, as you clearly have very little idea of what I actually said. Clearly you approached my article under the assumption that it must be wrong, without making any genuine attempt to comprehend it. Simply talking about logical arguments and supporting them with evidence doesn’t make it so – you have to actually do it. Clearly your approach to logic and evidence is nothing but a matter of faith.

Quite frankly, I don’t have time in this sitting to go sentence by sentence throughout the first few paragraphs to weed out all of the illegitimate conclusions drawn, but here are some points:

1.) Your assumption that religious folks claim atheism is the pure source of evil is something I’ve never heard, read, or even considered before. Ironically, my first exposure to such a concept is from an atheist. By no means is this the case (as you have discussed), but claiming religion to be the source of problems explicitly is pretty outlandish as well.

2.) Dismissing atheistic views in situations such as the Holocaust because people didn’t adequately question their leaders is ridiculous. Atheism is directly in respect to spirituality, not societal authorities. There may be ties, but the implicit correlation is just not there. Ironically, it would take a bold leap of faith to follow your conclusion,
as the logical evidence plainly doesn’t follow.

3.) To claim religion is detrimental because of war is to ignore an immeasurable positive side to religion: the contribution of moral structure to societies today. Note immeasurable. It is impossible to say exactly how much religion has affected the moral system within society as well as the justice system. However, I can tell you that it has been damn significant. Note that this is relevant to both the religious and the atheistic.

4.) The Bible is not a rulebook That’s the whole point, actually. The purpose of stories in that sense is to allow for people to draw on the teachings through situations, not explicit rules. Because things are not generally black and white, the Bible does not generally lay out black and white rules. This allows for translation into today’s lifestyle. Clever, huh?

5.) Dismissing religion due to those who are immoral practicing such religions is not adequate. Religious or not, humans are imperfect. Period. In fact, it is a complete contradiction to say that religion can’t exist due to the immorality of the religious yet to dismiss atheism’s inclusion in regimes such as Hitler’s because they didn’t question him and therefore couldn’t be atheist. Nice try.

6.) Putting God as the most immoral being in existence also doesn’t work within the scope of religion, and therefore cannot be a point of dismissal from religion.
Religion assumes the existence of God, then assumes God as the absolute moral standard. Thus human actions that threaten the purity of the moral standard require banishment (hell) or purification (Jesus, in the case of the Bible). The choice is that of the human, not of God at that point. That’s like calling the concept of quarantining a terminally diseased patient murder because they weren’t allowed to resume life among the others they would ruin.

7.) Quote: “The ten commandments clearly are not the word of any God, but rather those of a particular group of people at a very specific time and place.” Because you found things you didn’t see how to relate to? Because it seemed outdated? Not even close to adequate justification of this statement. Again, there is irony in that by you claiming this you are asserting that you KNOW the inner workings of a God, and therefore giving the notion that you believe they/it exist(s)/ You gave zero evidence to even come near concluding this. Assertions like this dismiss the validity of your entire article.

Your words in that section paraphrased:

Examples of humans (note: HUMANS, not God) doing bad things, one funny quote that shows that the language has changed => (that means implies in the logical/mathematical world) there is “clearly” no God.

Nice try.

8.) Your conclusions are drawn off of evidence unsupported (things I mentioned above), and the statement that Christians ignore the Old Testament? False. Did Jesus change things? Yes. Did we toss the Old Testament? No.

9.) Show me the plethora of events from the Bible that are demonstrably impossible. My area of study: Physics. Don’t try to fluff me on this one.

Always express your opinions, but take the time to think as you do. Support your conclusions. Be receptive to criticism. There are valid points in this discussion (i.e. that our existence is adequate evidence for God’s existence in the purely probabilistic sense… it is quite bold (stupid) to claim a full understanding of the number of events that have occurred in this universe). However, if you are going to target intellectuals and attempt to use logic, make sure that the conclusions are actually drawn from the data, and that gaps aren’t being jumped.

I look forward to a (hopefully) thoughtful response on this. I will be checking back. If I made you think, I have succeeded.

God Bless )

On Thursday, my mom said that my dad, who was almost an atheist when he newly married her never flourished much even though he was a very good student and a good person. But after he started to believe fully in God, he began to flourish like anything. My mom said that you’ll face a lot of loss if help an atheist.

As for your statement about the “countless number of prophecies that came true”, the only proof of that is the Bible itself! It’s the same as if you or I wrote a book that made some prophecies at the beginning, only to say that they came true by the end! That obviously doesn’t prove anything at all. The only prophecies we can judge the Bible on are the ones it says will happen in the future, and on that it is an epic failure. The prophecies of Revelation were supposed to have happened during the lifetime of the so-called ‘prophets’ who wrote the Bible, yet nearly 2 millennia later, they still haven’t – thank God!