And my belief is that God directed the flow of evolution.
Not knowing me or having had an opportunity to analyze my psyche, you are in no position to assert whether or not my experience was a delusion.

Like I said, I'm going to bed, and I'm busy all day tomorrow, so forgive me if I don't respond for a while. I'd also appreciate not being flooded with questions and whatnot, but I also don't want to deprive people of a chance to express themselves on this issue.

The existence of evil itself proves that God exists. What is darkness but lack of light? What is cold but lack of heat? Evil is not "something", it is a lack of something, a lack of God. For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. God would be of no use if the only thing available was Himself.

What is baldness but a lack of hair? Wow, baldness proves the existence of hair!

And the evidence for your belief is?


I am, because God doesn't exist, and you claim that you have been contacted by God.

How is that at all relevant? This is not an argument, just a bunch of obvious facts followed by absurd conclusions. How would you reply to the following thought experiment?

You are walking by a church which is holding a fund-raiser for hungry children worldwide. With every 10 dollars, they will save a life. You pause for a second and consider your options. You can either give 10 dollars, walk by and do nothing, or wait until everyone leaves, break in, and steal all the money. If you choose the first option, I'd say you're doing a good thing since you're presumably going to save a life. How is god's presence at all relevant to you donating money to save lives out of compassion for them? If you do the second thing, you're not doing anything good--you're just walking by apathetically. Yet you are not doing anything evil either. Clearly, there are morally neutral acts--is god only half there for these? Finally, choosing the third option is probably evil. So "god's absence" would have to be responsible for two acts that differ significantly in their moral status: one is neutral, the other is bad. This does not make sense.



The first statement is just Newton's first law of kinetics. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the second statement, which does not even make sense.

Exactly why I shouldn't have argued. That's a rather irresponsible argument.

Which proves that your argument was irresponsible.

lol, I have no idea what's keeping me up....


Hmm...if you can claim such things with such authority, then you must have extremely vast knowledge of the goings on of the universe...maybe you can help me with my homework? I'm trying to determine a basis for a subspace in R4 that is orthogonal to [1, 0, -2, 1] and [0, 1, 3, -2].

I don't need an extremely vast knowledge to know that your "God" doesn't exist. Please, answer my argument from non-belief, the one I posted before :

Belief in God is important, right? It would be nice if everyone believed in God, right? And God can certainly make people believe in him, without violating "free will." As you said, he can "influence" people to believe in him. Then, why do atheists exist? Wouldn't the all-loving God bestow the knowledge of his existence to the poor atheists by showing some sort of evidence to them?

I already answered that. If you don't want to accept it, that's your problem.

I can't find your answer. Quote it, please.

That's an answer? I asked you "why do atheists exist" and you say something completely irrelevant, like the sense of right or wrong being evidence for God's existence.

God does not make people believe, in the end it is the human who makes the decision whether to believe or not.

It appears in the cluster of questions, I have missed that one. Why do atheists exist? I can't answer for every atheist, for certain. I can only say that Satan has a strong influence in the world...and some seem to have a very limited definition of what God would have to be, which contradicts the state that the world is currently in. There are probably other reasons why atheists exist. It's not something I've had the opportunity to look into extensively, not personally knowing any atheists myself.

Why wouldn't God want humans to not belive in him?

Okay, another question : why does Satan exist (since you seem to think so)? Cannot the omnipotent God erase Satan, and wouldn't he like to erase him to make the world more lovely?

But that decision is, ideally, based on a rational examination of the observable evidence and philosophical argument. God is certainly not logically necessary, and the world does not offer any evidence of its existence. So perhaps if god wants me to believe that it exists, it should have provided a compelling reason to believe. I cannot simply choose to believe something. I can entertain the idea of a god existing, but I can't force myself to make a drastic change to my current belief structure on a whim.

May we continue this tomorrow? I'm not retreating or anything; I really do need to get to bed. Good night.

Okay, good night. But I'll just keep answering to stuff as long as there are things to answer.

Actually, throughout the bible Satan is repeatedly portrayed as an adversary for God, rather than an adversary of God. This is very evident in Jewish beliefs.

Anyway, then, why does an adversay for God exist?

Apparently so he can test the belief of and tempt people, or something along those lines. He's often referred to as "The Accuser", but my knowledge of this ends here.

Pretty much unnecessary, since the omniscient God knows how sincere the beliefs of individuals are.

One could argue that God prefers to act through persuasion rather than through coercion, but this line of thought is entirely dependent one's interpretation of the matter.

He can "persuade" people in less malevolent ways than using Satan to disturb them.

Indeed. I was just trying to clarify a number of things, not necessarily argue the logical worth of them.

Christian faith is one big contradiction. How is it that someone can use the Bible as "proof" of their God's word, but at the same time conveniently ignore the many atrocities and evils that said book promotes?

How can God be just if he created a reality in which his very existence seems highly implausible and then condemn people for not believing in him? Why didn't he make the salvation thing more straight-forward and less ambiguous?

Why did he make humans have a stupid, curious nature if he didn't want them eating the fruit? How could they have comprehended the concepts of right and wrong, obedience and disobedience when then fruit itself was what gave them that knowledge?

There are countless logically fallacies surrounding the Abrahamaic God, but religious types will just come up with cop-out answers like "free will" and so forth, so it's pointless arguing.

I'd beg to differ.

Would you like to provide evidence from the Bible that this is true, or are you just going to make claims about it and expect people to believe them?

http://www.usbible.com/Satan/satan_gods_angel.htm

I don't know why I'm up at this hour, though. Studies suck

Neither in the case of Job nor in the case of Jesus did God and Satan "conspire" to test their faiths. In Job's case, God knew Job would not falter (even within the context of Christianity, many believe Job to be an allegorical book rather than a true story, but that's a different matter) and thus was prodding Satan into tempting him in order to show him up.

In Jesus' case, it says that "Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" but nowhere does it say that the devil was incited by God to tempt Jesus.

Does not God give Satan the power and permission to inflict certain things upon Job to test his faith?

And the Lord said to Satan, "Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life."



Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Who is the Spirit then, and is this temptation by the devil merely one of those "unexpected" detours?

I don't know about you, but to me the whole situation looks like what you would expect from two guys gambling. God knows that Job won't falter, so he says "Sure, go ahead and afflict him, if you think you know more about him than I do."

If you were the devil, there's no way you could pass up a chance to tempt Jesus after he's been fasting for forty days (or however long it might have been, as "forty" is often used in the Bible to mean "a long time").

He will erase Satan. However, " The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." - 2 Peter 3:9

Why is this thread offering chapter and verse citations to the bible as though it were a source of authority to be deferred to rather than a work of fiction?

On which point? If god is logically necessary, then its negation must cause a logical contradiction. Yet a non-theistic worldview is not logically contradictory.

If there is evidence of some sort, I'm all ears.

The Bible is not entirely fiction. In some senses, it has historical value--believe it or not. I do think that some of the 10 Commandments are valuable. But overall, I agree, as a whole it should not be used as a symbol of authority. It should lie totally in historic context, and be taken with a grain of salt.


Better make that several grains of salt...

Fuck it, just eat some potato chips.

Whereas a benevolent god would just not allow suffering in the first place...



Look, it's really quite simple. I'm just asking how the presence of evil fits into the idea of a benevolent loving god. I'm trying to get a picture of how god can allow evil and suffering to afflict the innocent. I'm not talking about the inflicters (they will go to hell and be judged, right?) I'm talking about the sufferers, the victims, the INNOCENT victims. Maybe you did address this point earlier, and I missed it or misunderstood it. Can you help me out on this?

And, please if you could, try not to make reference to the afterlife. It's something beyond the ken of human understanding, if it exists. Can we at least try to get some temporal perspective here? Could god just not have invented disease and earthquakes and bad things? Or were those put here to 'test our faith'? Sorry to derail this thread, looks like it's picking up nicely.

Historical value <> Moral value. But I get what you were saying. Pity that a lot of the Bible's (new testament) worth is diminished by the fact that it was cherry picked and put together by the chief editor of the Roman Times.