"Why won't God heal amputees?"

Vhehn

I think athiests are the ones who are expressing faith. To say there is nothing out there seems to contradict what everthing that physics teaches. At the very least to say everything came from nothing takes as much faith as to say everything came from God or a Superior entity.

what or who created the big bang.


I even tried to bring the discussion up priviously.

I will get the thread here:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1032370&highlight=athiests#post1032370

Proposing that the Universe has been created by luck seems very emotional and irrational and requires, a belief in multiple big bangs and almost an infinity of parallel universes.

 

The assumption is a process of one step removed: how is it helpful to explain the complexity of the universe by postulating the existence of a being even more complex than the universe itself? It's not really a solution so much as a black box, as Ricky Gervais subtly points out. (And he did it all in the dark! Amazin'!)

The real problem with this argument though is that the leap of faith between first-mover creator and biblical God is almost as big as the leap between atheist and theist.

Even if one embraces the notion that something or someone must be responsible for reality in all its complexity, that doesn't really answer any of the important questions.

Pascal's wager, for one, was a false dichotomy: the choice is not between no god or the biblical god, but between no god and countless iterations of possible gods. If there is a creator, we really have no idea what he / she / it is like, or what the creator's motives are.

This is where biblical contradictions and philosophical problems with Christianity become relevant; even if one accepts the possibility of a sentient creator, a God with a capital G, evidence strongly suggests that this God is not the god of the bible.

Christianity dies the death of a thousand paper cuts; it logically implodes when inconsistencies of statements and claims are examined too closely. This is true apart from the theistic argument... if there is a God his purposes are hidden, intentionally so, or perhaps revealed through non "religious" means.

 

we dont know"what or who created the big bang" so therefore it had to be biblegod? why not zues or santa claus? you are a perfect example of thiests starting their investigation from the indoctrinated mindset that god exists and if we dont yet have an answer for something it had to be god that did it.
the atheist is simply saying unless you show me evidence i dont believe it. that isnt faith its simply rational thinking.

 

Than it is LITERAL speech. You must LITERALLY eat jesus and drink his blood.

Then it isn't LITERAL speech at all. You lied. It is FIGURATIVE speech.

You pretend to eat jesus with bread and pretend to drink his blood with wine. It is makebelieve because the LITERALspeech is literally impossible and aabhorrent anyway .

Which one is it to be !?

Now I know and you know, assuming religious indoctrination has not entirely removed all semblance of rational awareness from your thought processes, that you can't actually eat Jesus. Even though you say "eat his body and drink his blood. (gnaw on this flesh).... This was not figurative speech." ... you do realize don't you that it is FIGURATIVE speech. It is not possible to be Literal in this case?

You do realize don't you that by any normal standards to suggest anyone should eat another human's flesh would generally be considered debase, corrupt, depraved and repugnant in any event don't you? Even 2000 years ago to suggest people considered it ok to go about eating each other is not supportable. You do realize that don't you?.

So how come you think it's ok to come out with what you pathetically describe as "a little religious talk" , but which is actually a depraved idea. Why exactly? Because you have some religion behind you telling you religion is goodness and it is good to eat jesus and drink his blood?

Speak LITERALLY act FIGURATIVELY is that the kind of mixed up mumbo jumbo language you can only understand? You mean to say you eat jesus and drink jesus' blood Literally, but in fact you literally eat bread and drink wine figuratively!?

That type of indoctrination is exactly what convinces people they can say and do anything in the name of religious belief once convinced with a full knowledge that God Is On Their Side. Murdering, starting wars and flying airplanes into buildings, in the righteous belief that Jesus and Allah has saved them all because they drink his blood every Sunday and turn to the East five times a day. Then spin about and blame everyone for not understanding their religion that talks in those sick and perverted terms.

I do not "choose" not to believe in the vile, obnoxious and repugnant jesus ideas and beliefs you do jem. My personal standards of decency and humanity would simply not allow me to do so.

 

Would you like fries with that?

H

 

ddunbar;

"
No Religion, which is theism taken to the next level - codified, can be power, control, politics etc. But a belief in something greater than yourself (theism), which is not readily evident, is a unique characteristic in Homo Sapiens. That is why humans so readily adapt to theism and not atheism inspite of atheist claims and demands for proof. Atheism will always be a minority view until such time man can evolve away from this innate nature."


Well said.
Even stranger, all codified theism, the beleif in some great otherwordly force, contains a humanist ideolatry.
Often, in direct contradiction to the relevant scriptures-jesus teachings are the classic, does anyone not think he would be horrified by mass, or images of him, in a "holy" sanctuary? Which he himself stated, should be humble, and free of ostentation -you know, WITHOUT gold leaf?
Come to think of it, was he in favour of churches, at all?
Or islam, where all such images are forbidden-they beleive in allah-but they needed a messenger, or prophet to bring'em this marvellous news, who is treated as a deity?
Shoot, even scientology has humanoid aliens.

 

It's not so unique. It just so happens that humans have more imagination than any other inhabitants on the planet. If dolphins and apes had the chops to imagine and theorize, they would be drawn towards comforting explanations too. In otherwords, theism is not an interesting phenomenon in its own right. Imagination is.

As to why it's easier to embrace theism than atheism, that is probably a simple byproduct of how we are wired. We are built to believe, in order that parents can better transfer skills to offspring, and we almost always prefer a bad explanation to no explanation (the big bang is a result of... the Dow went up 50 points today because...). Skepticism takes work; critical thinking takes work; intellectual courage is rare. We instinctively preserve energy by coasting along our natural pathways, and in that regard humans as a species are addicted to comfort and eminently persuadable.

 

Damn, that was even more well said.

Imagination-animals dream, and most certainly have empathy, it cant just be lacking opposable digits that is the difference.

Man's god, is made in the image of man-not the other way around-were this not true, many "atheists" would have little difficulty accepting the cosmic soup, the physics of mathematics, as universal "things", and as such , the actual reality of what is referred to as god.

Theists however, are reluctant to abandon their little books, and cling to their humanoid symbols- and will kill to protect their delusions.

 

New to the forum first time poster. We are having a similar discussion at a forum I own and came across this website looking for material via google. I know it's a forum rule to read the thread before replying however there are 45 pages to it. I am currently on page 12 it's late I'm going to bed I'll read the rest tomorrow. Now here is my take on things:

Don't you guys think it's funny that everytime something is wrong with christianity, the only answer you will have is "Too complicated to for us inferior being to understand" or "God created you, what the hell more can you ask for"
Give me a break already, I want ANSWERS, not some excuses.
I was raise as a christian for the past 10 years and I stopped believing in god 5 years ago. Why? Whenever I asked my priest something, most of the time he said "Not for us to know" or "Be glad that you are alive, stop asking questions". Well, if you want someone to believe in your religion, then EXPLAIN first. No one will ever going to stay in your church for long if you don't answer them. Christians might think I am foolish for giving up on god, but until I can find answers, I have no god. Yet again, I don't think god actually exists because all the religions I heard of have many flaws and contractions.

I don't believe in god nor heaven... from my thoughts, it is nothing more then a fairy tale... it's something humans made up as to not be afraid of Death, and to not be responsible for their actions...

It's no different from Santa. It's just that we haven't matured enough for someone to tell us that "Santa isn't real".

Remember when you were a little kid and those presents got under the tree somehow? And someone told you Santa did it, and you believed them? It's the same thing, just because you don't know how it's done, you're willing to listen to the first thing that is introduced to you. Whether it's logical or not.

There are quite many theories on how earth started besides one big bang, who knows...? There are going to be millions and billions of questions that Humans won't be able to answer... me? I think a ton of different things could have happened. The easiest would be that when Earth was being created (gasses and other hard matter) that a meteor or comet stuck the land while it was carrying simple bacteria (frozen or not) thus starting the first life. "Well that's not right" and I understand but that's why as we know of it, we are the only living organisms in the universe, thus it was merely luck.

There are so many things that we don't have answers to, and most people just tend to use God as the answer to all of their problems.

You say that God proves you wrong every time you have doubts about him, how so? Does your life suck so much, you doubt in God, and then it becomes better...? I'll tell you right now, that's not God... if there was a God, why would there be diseases on Earth? Why would there be killings? Why would God create a perfectly healthy baby for someone that drinks, smokes, does pot, and could care less about god, while he gives a demented baby to someone that has always done good in their life and preaches for him? Why aren't we all just one big happy family?

And think about it, if you believe in god, then you have to believe in the devil, and you have to believe in hell, just another way to straighten our society, "be good and you shall be rewarded in your afterlife".

Well that's pure crap. The truth is, no matter how hard you try in life, or how far you get, at one moment, all of that won't matter, and for that brief second before you cease to exist you will think back at your life and wish that you had done so much more. But you can't because it's all over.

Even if there is an "afterlife" or "heaven" what would it be like...? You think that you die and your spirit goes to some place in the clouds where everything is happy and cheery and everyone dances and sings? Well?

If you truly believed that then you would have killed yourself long ago. Why live in a world with murders, and rape, and disease, and terrorists, and having to feel anger, and pain, and fear. Why not just kill yourself and go to "heaven" where everything is perfect and you can live for eternity.

I can keep going and going. but remember. Everything that you've been taught about God or heaven is all just one big fairy tale. Whether or not you want to believe it is your choice.

Believing that there's a God blindly without any proof is like blindly believing that I'm a 70-foot ogre with bad feet. Just because somebody's told you something doesn't make it true.

Read it all you want, you’re just following another HUMAN’s writings blindly. I mean if this happened now a days the scientists could prove something was different and thus prove God to exist, but if he is real why wont he come down? If he comes down now there would be evidence that he exists for ever more. Not just some crap written by other people thousands of years ago! Know one will stand up nowadays and say they can do miracles because we can now can see right through crap and people are a lot less gullible.

Sure, life had to have started somewhere. There must be some supreme being or some being that originated everything. If you want to call it God, well, that's just a man-made term - a definition. Like the bible. It's man made. Written by the hand of a man, a "story" if you will. Back in the days before the Internet, before TV, before radio, before telephones, before mail, before any kind of complex information sharing other than conversation was invented, people were naïve. They would believe anything to explain anything since they didn't have the tools to prove otherwise. Remember how all of England thought the world was flat? Well who started that rumor? Someone must have and people believed it because they didn't know any better. No one could prove it wrong. So what stops someone from saying he is God or the Son of God? If you get enough people to believe you then who's going prove you wrong?

 

The bible was an easy way of explaining why things are.
"Why is it raining, Daddy?"
"Oh, because God is crying..."
"Where did humans come from, Mommy?"
"From Adam and Eve..."

See how easy that is? And for the child, how can he/she disagree? They have no other information than what's given to them, the world before was a much younger world with adolescent minds. They didn't have the tools like Physics or Biology or Chemistry like we do today.

So the question is. Is there a God? I believe there is/was a being that originated everything. Is it supreme to us? I don't know, is it God? It's whatever you call it. What I disagree with is when someone uses the Bible to explain God. The Bible is strictly a path to finding a religion. It is a collection of stories to help you find faith so that you don't go around believing that all there is to life is death.


The funny thing is that you say that life can't just spontaneously start. Well then explain to me how God was created. Or was it just one day it went *poof* and there was some almighty being there...? And what was god? Some dude that got bored one day and thought. Hey why don't I do something that will be a pain in the ass and create life. And then *poof*.

I don't get it how you can explain that God created us. Yet you can't believe that we were created some other way.

There are so many things to it.

You know how in Ancient Egypt they had their beliefs in Ra and Anubis and tons of other Gods. Well do you think they exist...? Probably not! Do they think they exist...? Hell yeah! It's the same thing. You can think that the early civilizations were stupid or whatever for believing in such weird gods or whatever (the Hindu God cracks me up) but that's exactly how I feel for you people that think there is a god.

And yet NO ONE seems to be able to answer my question. If you believe in God then you must believe in heaven. And everyone pictures heaven as this beautiful place where everything is right and nothing can go wrong. I mean I asked my friend about this, and to him heaven is him relaxing smoking a bong, while his favorite music is playing and playing video games at the same time.

Well if heaven is so damn good that everyone pictures it then why doesn't anyone kill themselves and go to heaven? Why live in this world where life screws you over every time you let your guard down? Why live with the killings, and murder, and disease and all the other crap that "God" placed on earth? And why not just go to heaven where you will be constantly happy for all eternity?

You know why? It's because the logical side of your brain realizes that it's all bull crap and you're not willing to risk your life for your love of God. If you really had such strong beliefs. You would kill yourself "KNOWING" you would go to a better place.

Now how many of you here can tell me that you are at least 90% sure that heaven exists? Well to all those that swear ‘yes’, you are full of crap. Like I said before, you your self don't believe it unless you are willing to prove your faith.

and PLEASE do not test your faith... the last thing I want is to people to start killing themselves only to figure out that I screwed them over and they found out the hard way that there is no "to be continued..." after you are dead...

Just think about it. Do you really believe that God wrote the Ten Commandments through streaks of lightning... and that he spoke to Moses... well if he spoke to some Hewbrew... why hasn't he spoken since then... and I don't mean to the crazies and nuts at the mental institution... well... WHY?

there's so many questions I have concerning about God... and yet no one can answer them... you know why...? because no one knows anything about God except what some book tells them... and who (or what) was this Bible written by...? God... what you think God goes and writes different rules for every damn religion and language out there... you think if there was a God that he would sit there and write ways for us to worship him...?

God is nothing more then a way to keep us in line... why do you think God why make so many damn BS rules that we have to follow to be able to reach heaven...? what is there like a population limit in heaven... can not everyone enter...? so what... again, it's crap... just a method created in the ancient times to keep us in line... "be good, and god will accept you"... or "God is all forgiving" so if you screw up once... don't lose faith and kee0p being good...

face it... why we are in semi-control is that out fear of the unknown... death... no one wants it all to end the second their body stops functioning... so they believe in this thing called heaven... and to get INTO heaven you have to be good... and not good... but PURE... and tell me this... how many of you are actually pure...? hell the only pure humans I can think of are nuns... and they can get pretty naughty at times... so even if heaven exists what makes you think God wants you there...? have you done anything for him...? has he done anything for you that shows he gives a damn about you...?

please show me SOME proof, ANY proof that god exists... I would love to see all the comments, "well my life sucked, and I lost faith in god, then all of a sudden my life was better again"...

if you can't prove to me how god exists.... how can you prove it to yourself... I will bet you that those of you that voted that God exists still have doubts... or have had doubts... I don't think any of you can truefully tell me "I have no doubt that God exists" because wih this info that I brought up you have to have SOME doubt... whether it be little or not...

I could go on and on and on... but like I said, whether it was harsh or not... all that you have been taught about God is nothing more then a fairy tale, believe what you may, but the truth is right infront of you, don't let your thought of religion cloud you judgement... is it really logical to believe in something that goes beyond all logic... and not only that, but goes beyond all basic principlers that we are based off of...