We’re supposed to believe God exists, but it’s always humans telling us that. If God wanted us to think he exists, wouldn’t it be pretty simple for him to convince us?
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Except it’s really not funny at all….
Yeah. Not funny, ha ha…….but funny strange.
Its really not funny, and … its true.
Yeah. But its funny when it comes to uncomfortable topics, like God ordained genocide, then suddenly the Bible doesn’t mean what it says. We Christians can have it both ways.
On second thought, it does mean what it says to most Christians. The genocide is justified through apologetics because, you know, they were all evil people.
That totally makes genocide okay.
Well I understand anyway, god the perfect all knowing one, needs the praise of it’s silly/violent/stupid creations. Poor icon must have low self-esteem :’(
We always blame God, but surely it’s man.
God may or not exist, but if you believe the Bible (then the question would be which bible? the original, which cannot be transcribed or the one that has developed in the name of politics) then you would be confused all the time, confused as to why, for instance Christians claim that God doesn’t want abortions, yet Abortions and other child killing is predominant in it.
I used to be a Christian, but through careful study of the Bible, and the historical, and mostly political, changes the Bible has gone through I learned it was a book based on an olde worlde version of the most perverse of television – Fox News.
i agree with you completely,but how are we supposed to learn about god then when all we have are books that have been re translated over and over….
Why would God make it easy for us? Hehe! After all, it’s not like we risk burning in hellfire for the rest of eternity… or anything… nasty… like… tha…
Umm. Yeah. Good point.
So sad… hopefully this kind of irrationality will continue to fade…. in the US Atheism is right behind the Mormons in relation to acquisition of “new believers” though i know new believers in relation to Atheism is a non-sequitur.
I will like to say that I completly agree with Phil. There is historical proof. and it is the Bible. The bible has been translated directly from hebrew so it’s not a matter of false translation. We are more ready to believe that something out of nothing just blew up and created the universe and it’s complexities than to believe a written document. Could someone please give me a proveable example of an explosion resulting in the creation of something more complex? …a volcanic eruption?…no….a bombing of a building?…no….throwing computer parts around and hoping for a computer to take shape?…no……….hmmm…
Sorry, i missplaced my previous comment. It is in response to Phil’s point below.
So if there’s historical proof, why is your name “faith”? What do you need faith for if there’s proof?
Ahhhhhhahahahahahahahaha!
I apologize, I missused the word “proof”. We do need faith to believe that there is a God, but you also need faith to believe otherwise. For example, how do you think that the world was created as a result of a bang? No one was there. How do you know that we evolved from apes? You can’t turn a chimp into a human overnight. How do you know there is no God? No one knows everything. All of these require faith as do creation and the belief that there is a God. The bottom line is that there is only ONE truth. And we will find that out at the end of time…if there is one. :)
We are talking about vastly unequal amounts of faith.
Having faith in the notion that the chair won’t evaporate or grow wings and fly away when I sit on it is decidedly a different thing in scope than having faith in an invisible creator being.
It is faith nonetheless. Faith is faith, you either have it or you don’t. If you’re in the middle you clearly have none. No one can have more or less faith.
Faith – it’s heaven or vegas baby…..heaven or vegas :)
I can assure you it is nothing like Vegas.
Are you saying that you think there is a heaven then?
You’re right… God could come to us in the form of a man… we’d probably kill him, but then he’d rise from the dead… oh wait… that all happened and people still don’t believe.
God has given us every reason already to believe in him, even outside of Jesus, we see the existence of God in nature. (Though saving knowledge of God is found only in Jesus.)
>>that all happened and people still don’t believe.
My problem with that is how do you know for sure?
>>We see the existence of God in nature
Can you give me a specific irrefutable example?
God’s given us “every reason to believe in him”…except actually interacting with humankind in such a way as to be incontrovertibly verifiable. Instead, this alleged deity seems to “appear” (and in most cases, by proxy) to people whom we would consider to be mentally unstable. But if you have some incontrovertible, empirically verifiable proof of the existence of this deity, Phil, please share.
Didn’t you read his post … “we see the existence of God in nature.” Not sure what that means exactly but that’s the kind of guy god is. He doesn’t like to blow his own trumpet ,so to speak, so prefers things a little more understated. It’s obvioulsy our fault for not seeing the evident truth in this. I mean just look at the Earth, you’d think it had been tailor made for being inhabited by humans. Consider just how perfect the entire planet is for us.
The Earth is not pefect to us, the planet is trying to kill us.
We need protection like houses, clothes and machinery to stay alive.
actually the Earth is pretty perfect for us. it sure beats the hell out of Mars or Venus anyway.
My point exactly …
Minus all the mega tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, disease, this is a perfect world.
From deserts to the poles, alot of the Earth’s biomes are hostile to human habitation.
This is not the best of all possible worlds Dr. Pangloss.
Earh will be very deadly in a million years from now.
… and who gave us the free will so as to ‘invent’ these items. Was it not god?
If god is omniscient and he can see all of time and see how everything turns out, why were things so primitive and that it was up to humans to progress anything? Do you know how long it was before PANTS were invented? I notice no animals sinned in the garden, they’re all allowed to be naked except for some dogs, and they don’t have to go to church every Sunday. Don’t tell me we’re superior as humans compared to mere beasts either. What we are tends to be gullible to charismatic public speakers who interpret the word of god, animals do no such seeking. I mean, who is the superior bullshit sniffer? We are animals with the intellectual capacity to do it, but some take their brains, put them in a box, wrap it up with a big bow and hand it to their invisible friend because they don’t understand how flowers and snowflakes could even exist if someone didn’t make them so pretty. Too large a job for humans to conceive could just happen without a designer. You’re not qualified to call that a logical conclusion.
Sorry Kodie I was joking with my comments. The one thing I did realise was that acting like a fundie is far, far easier that actually having to think for yourself.
I caught on a little later downthread you silly Poe! Here, have a rainbow.
“Do you know how long it was before PANTS were invented?”
Do you know how many people suffered and died before antibiothics were discovered?
Yeah yeah, that was god’s will because the germs weren’t discovered yet, so they didn’t exist until we had to make telescopes to see them and medicine to fight against them. But god made a world in which pants weren’t supposed to be necessary . So but anyway, god exists even though we can’t see him with a telescope because he leaves his calling card in the shape of the genetically bred banana and rainbows.
Jabster, you’re absolutely right! Tomorrow, I shall go have lunch with a black bear and then go play with a copperhead. ;-)
I’ve heard this argument used more than once about how lucky we are to live on such a perfect planet so it most be divine intervention. Well as long as you disregard the oceans, the poles and then vast tracks of desert all of wish are virtual uninhabitable by humans. Even then you are left with an environment then even now makes life hellish for a significant proportion of the human race. So perfect seems to mean possible or perfect for the creator if it was a sadist. I’ll remember to remind my other half that I got her the most ‘perfect’ birthday present using this terminology!
“I mean just look at the Earth, you’d think it had been tailor made for being inhabited by humans. Consider just how perfect the entire planet is for us.”
You have that quite backwards. We evolved to fit the planet, not the other way around.
I think Jabster was being facetious.
@CoffeeJedi
That’s because you’ve interpreted the evidence from your world viewpoint and I’ve done the same from my world viewpoint. Both of these viewpoints are based on the same amount of faith and so are equally valid unless you’re trying to persecute my beliefs? It’ll be a sad day when this persecution has gone so far that it will become acceptable for a non-Christian to become the president of the United States of America.
I think we already have a closet non-Christian as president. He only goes to church for show, I bet…
Of course he’s not a Christian with a name like that!
Well, I was thinking it was the Harvard Law Degree, but I guess his name could be part of it too (he was raised by a liberal Hawaiian mom).
I agree, we adapted to the planet so it became our home.
But in a 1000 years both the Moon and Mars will be perfect for us since we adapted to it. By then we probably have the medicine to adapt to low gravity, radiation and low atmosphere.
But from romantic point of view, saying that some men with a beard created all thos for us, sounds sooo romantic even though it is not true. The thougt counts, it does not have to be real to be romantic.
And then he could have stayed here instead of blasting off to somewhere in space and being here with each generation could have continued doing all those stupendous things he did for other people back then to convince them. But he didn’t because he had to send the invisible God who was already everywhere so that we would have a comforter who would clear up everything….
I’m getting a headache.
No, he didn’t. First of all, there’s no historical third-party historical evidence whatsoever to suggest that Jesus even existed (in fact, he might well have just been a re-telling of an OT story – Joseph). Secondly, stories of “the resurrection” didn’t appear until generations after he was supposed to have lived (likewise the immaculate conception.
As for seeing God in nature: I have heard an awful lot of extremely plausible explanations for the existence of nature (i.e. abiogenesis and evolution) which have a HUGE amount of facts and evidence that back them up – so why should I believe in an extremely implausible one (i.e. God and the Genesis story) which has absolutely no facts or evidence whatsoever to suggest that it’s anything other than a myth?
Sorry, Phil, but if you make a sweeping statement like that about your imaginary sky-daddy, then you’d best be able to back it up!
“Sorry, Phil, but if you make a sweeping statement like that about your imaginary sky-daddy, then you’d best be able to back it up!”
How most naive of you. When have you every seen this type of statement backed up? It almost seems like some mantra that must be repeated over and over again until its truth can not be questioned.
That’s how we roll, here in America. Scream loud and often enough, and voila! Truth!
It’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way working with my American colleagues … they have a far greater capacity to sound (be?) confident even if they aren’t that sure. In the UK the tendency is to play it the other way around and only be that confident when you would stake your mother’s life on it.
“we’d probably kill him, but then he’d rise from the dead… oh wait… that all happened and people still don’t believe. ”
Yah, so glad he gave that up and started with the much more believable appearing in the form of Cheeze Sammiches, Dirty Windows, and Bird Poop.
WIN!
Yeah, that was pretty funny.
I’m of Irish/Welsh decent and I just discovered my God “Lugus” is older then your biblegod, (so there) and your God plagiarized my Gods story….
“Lugus was believed to have had a strange birth. His mother was the virgin goddess Aranrhod (“Silver Wheel”). When her uncle, the great magician Math, tested her virginity by means of a wand of chastity, she at once gave birth to a boy child, who was instantly carried off by his uncle Gwydion and reared by him. Aranrhod then sought repeatedly to destroy her son, but she was always prevented by Gwydion’s powerful magic; she was forced to give her son a name and provide him with arms; finally, as his mother had denied him a wife, Gwydion created a woman for him from flowers. “(http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/350984/Lugus)
(his Mom was even tested by “the wand of chastity” plus she didn’t have to go through the whole 9 month thing and he wasn’t born in a barn either, plus his wife was made from flowers.
Top that bible god….
The great magician’s name was Math? And he uses a, um, “wand of chastity” to “test” for virginity?
I like this religion much better already.
>>Can you give me a specific irrefutable example?
Hi. I’m still waiting for your response Phil.
Phil? Hello….? Phil…..?
Phil was either a Poe, or a Drive By Christian. Nothing more to see here.
I agree, Sunny. We’ll likely see Phil again when Daniel does a post that mentions abortion.
Couldn’t god just appear to each of us in a vision and speak the tongue we each are familiar with and say “yeah, im for real yo” ?
Seriously, wouldnt be that hard for an all powerful creator to make his existence known.
So, if he does exist, he’s an ass, or Loki, because he like to play games.
Of course He could, but why should He? He already gave us His proof of existance 2000 years ago. It’s too bad that people still don’t “see” Him. But then what is faith? You’re probably sitting in a chair which then you have faith that it’s holding you up. Everyone has faith. Why can’t we have faith that we are accountable to a higher power? Are we scared of what the consequenses will be of our sins, so we just deny God and pretend there is no such thing? Satan will blind us into believeing this. If there IS in fact a higher power (…who knows… there could be…) and you stand before him at the end of your life, what will you say? Think about it.
“If God wanted us to think he exists, wouldn’t it be pretty simple for him to convince us?”
I think Xtians think it is simple–”just look around.” As an atheist, I look around and say, “yea…your point?”
Like (I think) Hitchens said, in order to be persuasive throughout all time, all Jesus would have had to do is something he said his followers would be able to do if they had faith the size of a mustard seed,: move a mountain. Surely his faith was greatest of all and it therefore should have been easy for him. People would see it recorded in history and geography that a mountain that was sitting *here* is now sitting *there*. That would have been irrefutable proof of the truth of what Jesus (allegedly} spoke.
Hmmm… The Bible. The Alleged Word
You know, if God was so busy minding his own busines, you would think that god would create some kind of certification program for priests. And once in e while they go up to heaven for additional training.
And have a magic forcefield that rebuffs the lewd advances of dirty little children.
Ah yes, those alter boys. Always trying to sidetrack priests doing the lord’s work.
why else would god send them to the church lookin so damn good?
sign from god…
I came across this priceless bible verse yesterday:
Exodus 4:24–26
24 At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. 26 So the Lord let him alone.
Yep God ran into Moses in the hallway of a lodge. Right up there with the sheep and horses in heaven verse. Horses you ask? Yes, enough for the armies of heaven. As someone said on here, why would they need armies in heaven? “To keep out the gays!!” lol
Don’t gays go straight to hell? Lol. Completely agree with everything on this post except for Phil…