33 Questions that will make you an atheist

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Originally Posted by ermitonto

The problem with stating that there is or isn't a god is that it's very hard to define what exactly a "god" is. I can show individual religions not to be true, but I can't discredit anything anybody might consider a god, since different people have widely divergent definitions of gods. For example, one man might believe in God as interpreted literally from the Bible, while another might believe in a god merely as whatever event caused the universe to come into existence, and yet another might consider God to simply be synonymous with the sum total of everything that exists, existed or will exist. Now clearly all of existence exists, so that form of God must be real (but I have to question what value one gets out of calling it "God").

When I say I don't believe in God, what I mean is that I find highly unlikely the existence of some extremely powerful force/energy/spirit/whatever in the universe that is not made out of observable matter and energy. If we can't empirically observe this thing, whatever it is, for all practical purposes we can assume it doesn't exist, like unicorns. And if it does exist, it seems to be pretty indifferent to the acts of us humans and nothing is gained by wasting your time with it if we can't even detect its influence on our reality.

What I do know for certain is that the Christian God does not exist. Since most people with whom I debate the existence of God are Christians, this makes things a lot easier for me. Christians have a tangible dogma that I can analyze, and they make specific assertions about how God might have interacted and still be interacting with the world as we know it, so their hypotheses are testable. All Christian interpretations of God are based largely on the Bible, so we can use this text to find out if the Christian God, the most widespread conception of a deity, is real or not. And the overwhelming evidence is that it is not. Even most Christians will acknowledge that huge portions of the Bible, like Noah's Flood and Moses parting the Red Sea and such, are merely works of fiction. And yet I haven't seen one Christian explain to me how to reliably distinguish the fiction from the non-fiction in the Bible. What do we trust, what don't we trust? With such wacky tall tales in it, how can people be so sure that the other parts of it are true? Plus the book contains big glaring errors, contradicting itself hundreds of times. For instance, there are two Adam and Eve stories; one where they were both created simultaneously, and one where God fucks up at first and only creates Adam, tries to get him to commit bestiality, and finally realizes he needs a human vagina to complement Adam's human penis (duh, you "omniscient" idiot!). In one passage God is saying "thou shalt not kill", and then in another he orders the Israelites to commit genocide on the Amalekites. In one passage it will say that all sins are forgiven, and in another it will say that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost "shall not be forgiven unto men". Largely the same arguments can be made against the existence of the Jewish and Muslim gods.

So if there is a God, I know for a fact that it can't be the one as depicted in the major monotheistic religions of the world, and that's what really matters when I call myself an atheist. It's just a label to define my beliefs in relation to those of others. Of course it would be impossible to say that no gods exist without a clear and precise definition of just what a god might be, and that would be a fairly pointless exercise anyways since whatever you decided a god is, most people would probably disagree with you. But if we're discussing the ideas of God as depicted in the holy texts central to the "revealed" religions, they fall about as easily as a row of dominos.

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I completely agree with every bit of what you typed. Nice facts.

I have more belief in extraterrestrial life than that of some being called "God". I consider the label of "atheist" to mean just a normal person, that actually knows the truth. While with religion, just vice versa. It is possible that there was a human named Jesus that existed and that Virgin Mary too existed and was not a virgin at all! For all we know, Jesus faked his death on the cross and lived out the rest of his life as a very quiet man.

Have you ever stop to think that we can all be God?

That's just something I've heard... :stoned:

Also, I heard there were others born of virgins, before three wisemen or whatever it was, and on December 25.

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Originally Posted by Tholiak

25. If the earth was covered by a complete global flood, every living creature killed except those surviving on the ark, why are there many completely unique animal species in Australia that are found no where else indigenously on the earth?

Survival of the fitest maybe? Bigger badder animal ate up the smaller one, or might not have a been a bigger badder animal to eat a small one.

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well, i think there was probably a flood, also it's been accounted for in a lot of religions on completly remote areas of the world. if there was the flood, then everything could have eroded and had different properties making it really hard for us to determine the actual date. so the flood could have happened before the tectonic plates separated australia from asia, and then the survival of the fittest could have taken its course.

athiesm is a part of omnitheism...

Another point to add is that every christian that has complete faith (most) are practicing "doublethink" to believe 2 contradictory ideas at once. They believe that humans existed harmoniously at the same time as the dinosaurs? It is amazing how blind faith can be so insidious in cultures throughout the world. Why do christians believe in god? because they were told by people to believe in god. And the people before them. Christianity doesn't even make an effort to sound believable when you pick it apart.

stop picking on religions, they dont know any better, they are all attempts at compiling the truth into a way of life, and it takes a little bit of all of them in order to catch a glimpse of this enigma of truth.

The whole point of a religion is to have a figure whom we all can strive to become.