Challenge the Atheist!

[dblack]

i can bet a plug nickle that if/when you find yourself in the presence of god those will not be your first three words.

isn't god supposed to be omnipresent?

if god is the god of the living and you do not perceive him, is it because god does not exist or is it that you do not qualify as the living?

The dwelling place of god, his sanctuary, is within the boundaries defined by the law. If you do not apply yourself to conform to the law, the way of life, then you will never evolve into a creature capable of perceiving god and will remain outside in the realm of existence, the wilderness, where god is absent and the lower beasts of the field devour one another.


Purify your mind and be refined and you will see god, not just now but when you look back you will see that he was always there and intimately involved throughout your entire life..

ok

 

[numan]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

Evil and pain exist, so God cannot be all-benevolent.

God cannot make a stone bigger than He can roll, so He cannot be omnipotent.

Gödel's Proof demonstrates that God cannot be omniscient.
.

 

[HUGGY]

I can bet a plug nickle that if/when you find yourself in the presence of God those will not be your first three words.

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

If God is the God of the living and you do not perceive him, is it because God does not exist or is it that you do not qualify as the living?

The dwelling place of God, his sanctuary, is within the boundaries defined by the law. If you do not apply yourself to conform to the law, the way of life, then you will never evolve into a creature capable of perceiving God and will remain outside in the realm of existence, the wilderness, where God is absent and the lower beasts of the field devour one another.


Purify your mind and be refined and you will see God, not just now but when you look back you will see that he was always there and intimately involved throughout your entire life..

OOOOOOOooooo.... Sounds real impressive. Human beings deciding what this god creature will or won't do. Ya..I'm sure god runs his actions through some blowviating bullies first.

 

[Underhill]

How do you know? What supports your belief? And what if you're wong?

I can't speak for others, but if I am wrong I will look at god and simply say, "What the fuck?"

I can bet a plug nickle that if/when you find yourself in the presence of God those will not be your first three words.

I'm betting we will never know...

 

[hobelim]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

Evil and pain exist, so God cannot be all-benevolent
.

there are different classes of evil. Much evil and pain is subjectively perceived. Many people feel pain or perceive evil and suffering simply when they can't get what they want.

can you perceive no good purpose in physical pain that you might have overheard in 9th grade biology class?

Isn't the very best day at the barbecue the very worst day for the food eaten???

and if living things on earth did not suffer and die how would the earth sustain all of the forms of life present to this day?

 

[hobelim]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

If God is the God of the living and you do not perceive him, is it because God does not exist or is it that you do not qualify as the living?

The dwelling place of God, his sanctuary, is within the boundaries defined by the law. If you do not apply yourself to conform to the law, the way of life, then you will never evolve into a creature capable of perceiving God and will remain outside in the realm of existence, the wilderness, where God is absent and the lower beasts of the field devour one another.


Purify your mind and be refined and you will see God, not just now but when you look back you will see that he was always there and intimately involved throughout your entire life..

OOOOOOOooooo.... Sounds real impressive. Human beings deciding what this god creature will or won't do. Ya..I'm sure god runs his actions through some blowviating bullies first.

No, its not human beings deciding what God will or won't do, Its human beings perceiving what God does and doesn't do and conforming to his will if they have eyes that see.

Think of it. If God was looking down at all the bloviating bullies peddling BS in his name(for a nominal service charge) and saw all of the cowering sissies who know they are full of shit but do nothing to remove those bloviating bullies from their usurped place of moral authority over everyone else and don't have the faith to refute their false claims and blatent fraud then God is probably just going to hide his face from you, sit back and let you suffer the fruits of your own cowardice..alone.

 

[Jimmy_Jam]

When it comes to faith, spiritual belief, higher order, etc., there is only one thing that I am certain of: human beings have an inescapable spiritual drive. This is true now, was true in antiquity, and was true in prehistory. I find the discovery of Gobekli Tepi an extremely fascinating demonstration of sophisticated religious observance that predates written history by a significant amount, and there is at least another 50 years before the entire thing is unearthed.

God is real, be it a well-defined deity and set of laws by a developed religion, a vague perception of a higher order or power, or simply a human construct. The unmistakable reliance of humanity on spiritual matters from before recorded history make God very real. Scientific inquiry can help to debunk the superstitious, and indeed should, but in all of it's advances, the one thing it cannot do is disprove the existence of God. Disproving the existence of God is an impossibility, whereas recognizing the reality of God in the lives of human beings is much easier to do. In that spirit I have always believed that God exists, even if at the very least in the way that ideas exist, especially ones that have been around as long as religion.

One of my favorite thinkers is Carl Jung, who recognized this very well. He held that to dislocate the religious drive one must replace it with something else. He held that to most this came in the form of the state, with state processions and "hoopla" carrying many times a fervor rivaling the religious processions of old. Modern positive atheism replaces this drive with a similar fervor for science. Indeed I have seen this fervor demonstrated here an elsewhere, a sentiment that science can give us virtually everything. And so, the feeling of providence by a deity is dislocated and replaced with a feeling of provident by science, or the state. I'm sure some atheists may feel offended by that, but I have seen too many instances of atheists demonstrating a reverence for science that is every bit as intense as the reverence I have seen amongst the religious. I think most honest atheists, however, will probably acknowledge this.

Science and religion have always had their little disagreements, but in the last 200 years or so, there is a schism between the two that was not always the case. Battle lines have been drawn between science and faith, with political lines being drawn right over them. This is unfortunate, because we're not moving forward as a country or society. We're stagnating, maybe even falling backwards. Today we don't see people observing their religious freedoms (including the freedom not to be) and being happy to have them. Instead, we see theists and atheists competing with one another over what gets taught in schools, how much legal protection unborn life has, how marriage is defined, etc. The result of this is that more and more Americans are finding it impossible to live their lives without either being swept up into the conflict, or giving up and losing all interest in any sense of civic duty or awareness.

Blah blah blah blah. I guess I went on a rant.

Well written and well explained. I agree with this 100%.

I'm not sure how you define me, I have been called an atheist and agnostic, but I believe in god and spirituality. I think the fact that I do believe god exists, prevents me from being an agnostic, because I have no question in my mind regarding this. The term "atheist" kind of makes my skin crawl, because it makes me think of someone who rejects belief in god, and I fully believe god exists. I describe my personal belief as "spiritualist." My beliefs are "atheistic" because I don't subscribe to any organized religious dogma. In fact, I think religion often misses the point of human spiritual connection. It's a personal connection, not confined to what any particular group or preacher has defined it to mean.

I personally believe that organized religions are mankind's way of dealing with something they can't comprehend or understand. In order for the human mind to 'relate' to spiritual connection, men have developed human-like attributes and applied them to spiritual god. We can understand and relate to human-like attributes, so this makes perfect sense. However, it has always puzzled me, how an "omnipotent deity" retains attributes like jealousy, anger, desire, compassion, etc. Why would such a god NEED us to do anything, or even care? If god is omnipotent and perfect, couldn't he just make us all understand and believe in him, do the right things, make the right decisions? I mean, if that is what he wants us to do? I just find it odd that he supposedly gives us "free will" but gets angry at us if we don't obey his will, and sends us to hell as punishment.

Why does god need to punish us, couldn't he just instantaneously 'zap' us into another existence, if we started being evil and doing bad things? Can you imagine, we're witnessing someone commit "sin" and suddenly, they vanish before our eyes? What happened to them? Well, they did wrong and god zapped them to hell! Seems like a much more efficient and effective way for 'omnipotent' god to get us to do good and not sin. Religious people may say, well, he wants us to stick around so that maybe we will "repent" before we die, but why would "omnipotent god" give a crap if we are "saved" or repent?

So what is it that I believe in as "god" who isn't necessarily a deity or omnipotent? The best way to describe it, is a form of energy we can't measure with physical science, or at least, haven't figured out how to do so at this time. This spiritual energy force, doesn't have feeling and needs, doesn't possess human attributes, and doesn't care whether or not we acknowledge it's existence. However, through meditation and concentration, humans have the ability to connect to this spiritual force, as a conduit, and it provides a variety of beneficial results. Mental strength to overcome challenge, physical strength to achieve the otherwise impossible, inspiration and enlightenment regarding the universe around us.

I also believe this same spiritual force is responsible for a number of physical phenomenon, which physical science can explain, but can't really justify. For instance... we can prove what electricity is, and how it works, but can science tell us why the electrons behave as they do? We know what gravity is, and we understand how gravity works, but we can not prove why it exists. We've theorized it exists because of mass and density, then we've discovered this is not always true, it also exists because of atmospheric pressure. But these are "causes" of gravity, they don't explain why it exists. The solar wind, we know what it is, and we know how it happens, but we don't know why it happens the way it does. Why does two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen, form a material that is the building block of all physical life we know of? We can explain HOW, we can't explain WHY. We observe phenomenon, we can sometimes explain it, but we can't ever really explain why it exists in our universe.

Science is literally built around asking the question of Why? Science is never conclusive. As soon as a scientific discovery is made, the next question of why is born. Science is a never-ending quest for knowledge, but lots of people wish to assume science infallible and conclusive. Those who do this, have perverted science and scientific theory, usually to advance a personal agenda or idea. Science is supposed to present theory of probability, and nothing more. Every law of physics and every discovery of science, is based on probability.

To exemplify this, Dr. Michio Kaku says he presents his physics students with the following problem: Calculate the possibility that your physical body will dismantle cells and reform on the other side of a brick wall? His point is, it is indeed a possibility. To calculate this possibility would take longer than the universe has existed, but it's still a possibility. In other words, science simply never concludes something is impossible. Yet people will often say... "That contradicts science!"

This brings me to one last point, the arrogance of human nature. We tend to arrogantly believe man has answered all the questions, and science has proven all we ever need to understand. If something challenges what science predicts, it's viewed as "impossible" because it "contradicts science," and in our minds, science is infallible and conclusive. But we can see that this is not the case, science has had to reevaluate many theories, or completely abandon them, because we learn something we didn't know. We observe phenomenon in our universe that science can't explain. I believe spirituality is one of those things.

A lot of bullshit to cover there. But I will just touch on two examples.

First, science most certainly does tell us some things are not possible. For example, the notion of creating something from nothing. These boundaries are called laws.

Second, I as an atheist do not even suggest that we might know everything. I don't even claim to know god doesn't exist. But I see no evidence of him. And like aliens or elvis, I need a bit more than rumor, feelings and superstition to make me a believer.

Then I'll take it that you are speaking for yourself, in which case I'm not referring to you.

 

[Jimmy_Jam]

Dear JimmyJam: the prophecies that describe what humanity will experience in general
are already demonstrated, either individually or collectively or both.

People will divide over issues of justice and the law, for sake of Justice or Jesus,
and divide congregations brother against brother; family against family;
accusing one while excusing the other, haggling over the letter of the law.

We see this happening every day. It happens here, and in politics.

People will be crying out for the Lord or Jesus, for the spirit of Justice and spirit of the LAW to come forth.

The sheep and the goats will be delineated.
The secular from the sacred, the people under church law and the people under state law
as we seek to establish the laws or spirit of JUSTICE to fulfill BOTH, as the meaning of Jesus.

Both the secular gentiles under natural laws will seek and respond to truth and justice
by CONSCIENCE, as you and I are even doing here,
as the believers under sacred laws are called to be witnesses to defend truths under those
laws as well, as we are seeing here.

So this is already happening, and has BEEN happening since people gained self-awareness
and started receiving, writing down and sharing knowledge of the LAWS.

the same process the church goes through, with losing the spirit of the laws to corruption
by the letter of the law exploited for greed for power,
the state is also going through, with trying to restore the original spirit of the laws
as EQUAL JUSTICE that have been lost to political partisan greed for power the SAME WAY.

so we see this same pattern happening again historically.
All things humans have experienced are part of this pattern.

the point is to learn how NOT to repeat the same mistakes that lead to corruption and war,
but to understand how to break the cycle of injustice by the spirit of Restorative Justice
which is the secular equivalent of Christ Jesus, bringing peace and justice for all.

This is happening, you can see the process going on now.
How it is fulfilled, you would have to look at successful cases of
Restorative Justice bringing mediation and peace to situations of conflict,
to see miniature examples of how this process has been working for people who try it.

And then infer that if this same process is repeated collectively
then all humanity can reach peace and justice the same way, by forgiving
and correcting wrongs so that there is equity and even restitution to heal relationships
and restore good faith.

This has not happened yet, for all humanity, so it is not yet fulfilled.
It takes a leap of faith to see that if forgiveness can breing about
recovery and redemption for diverse cases here and there,
then it shows this can and/or is happening for all of humanity collectively.

This will not be proven physically until we see it more fully achieved in real life
events and relationships. We can start with this board, and show the peace process of establishing common agreements on truth and justice is happening
here, but taking it further into the physical reality and making peace among
religious and political parties nationwide and worldwide is a subsequent level after that.

Thanks Emily.

When it comes to faith, spiritual belief, higher order, etc., there is only one thing that I am certain of: human beings have an inescapable spiritual drive. This is true now, was true in antiquity, and was true in prehistory. I find the discovery of Gobekli Tepi an extremely fascinating demonstration of sophisticated religious observance that predates written history by a significant amount, and there is at least another 50 years before the entire thing is unearthed.

God is real, be it a well-defined deity and set of laws by a developed religion, a vague perception of a higher order or power, or simply a human construct. The unmistakable reliance of humanity on spiritual matters from before recorded history make God very real. Scientific inquiry can help to debunk the superstitious, and indeed should, but in all of it's advances, the one thing it cannot do is disprove the existence of God. Disproving the existence of God is an impossibility, whereas recognizing the reality of God in the lives of human beings is much easier to do. In that spirit I have always believed that God exists, even if at the very least in the way that ideas exist, especially ones that have been around as long as religion.

One of my favorite thinkers is Carl Jung, who recognized this very well. He held that to dislocate the religious drive one must replace it with something else. He held that to most this came in the form of the state, with state processions and "hoopla" carrying many times a fervor rivaling the religious processions of old. Modern positive atheism replaces this drive with a similar fervor for science. Indeed I have seen this fervor demonstrated here an elsewhere, a sentiment that science can give us virtually everything. And so, the feeling of providence by a deity is dislocated and replaced with a feeling of provident by science, or the state. I'm sure some atheists may feel offended by that, but I have seen too many instances of atheists demonstrating a reverence for science that is every bit as intense as the reverence I have seen amongst the religious. I think most honest atheists, however, will probably acknowledge this.

Science and religion have always had their little disagreements, but in the last 200 years or so, there is a schism between the two that was not always the case. Battle lines have been drawn between science and faith, with political lines being drawn right over them. This is unfortunate, because we're not moving forward as a country or society. We're stagnating, maybe even falling backwards. Today we don't see people observing their religious freedoms (including the freedom not to be) and being happy to have them. Instead, we see theists and atheists competing with one another over what gets taught in schools, how much legal protection unborn life has, how marriage is defined, etc. The result of this is that more and more Americans are finding it impossible to live their lives without either being swept up into the conflict, or giving up and losing all interest in any sense of civic duty or awareness.

Blah blah blah blah. I guess I went on a rant.

I guess you did.

Nestled in your RANT are a couple of lines I found wanting.

"God is real" , "He held that to dislocate the religious drive one must replace it with something else"

I can see why "Boss" likes your delivery. False premis imbeded in rote logic. The only thing "real" about the concept of god is that this fantasy has infected the mental stability and honesty of billions of people. God is real in the same fashion as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are real and for nearly the same dishonest reasons. I find it a bit troubling that to sustain Santa, the rodent and god in our culture we must trick children.

We are dragging an anchor of fantasy that undermines much of human reason and your favorite justification for this deciet is that it is claimed because without these lies we would have to "replace them with something else"? Really?... Seriously? Is THAT how the Pope's friend Galileo was rebuffed? Oh that's right..he did offer a suitable replacement... THE TRUTH.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RiU2T4Psyc]"Galileo" Indigo Girls - YouTube[/ame]

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real. Both are human constructs, yet nobody can prove whether or not either exists. We do not know whether or not the Universe is infinite, nor is it possible to know for sure, unless your eyes can see infinitely. Yet, infinity is used in mathematics and physics to denote a number greater than any real number. In other words, we can imagine that things go on forever, but we can't prove it, but it is still real in that it is recognized and used and has conceptual weight.

If you disagree with Carl Jung that's your freedom. I find his position poignant.

If you consider me a fundamentalist Christian and want to argue as if I am one, I suppose you can. I consider myself a bit of a mystic, so I guess it can come across as religious.

Oh, and the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny bit is tired and cliched. I'm sorry but I'm struggling with how to address a comparison between Santa Claus and a spiritual drive that has existed since prehistory. If your premise is that spiritual belief is ignorance, then humanity has always been ignorant and there's nothing atheism will do to cure it. Since I don't consider spiritual belief ignorant (despite my many problems with organized religion), I don't worry about that. But good luck. Let me know how it turns out.

Science and spiritual belief do not need to be mutually exclusive, nor have they always been so. Neither Galileo's scientific contributions nor his conflicts with the Catholic church made him stop being a devout Catholic who believed in God.

 

[BreezeWood]

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real. Both are human constructs, yet nobody can prove whether or not either exists. We do not know whether or not the Universe is infinite, nor is it possible to know for sure, unless your eyes can see infinitely. Yet, infinity is used in mathematics and physics to denote a number greater than any real number. In other words, we can imagine that things go on forever, but we can't prove it, but it is still real in that it is recognized and used and has conceptual weight.

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.

God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.


How sad: "God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real" - the Christians have joined the Atheist, they too are from Mars ... the Planet.

 

[Jimmy_Jam]

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real. Both are human constructs, yet nobody can prove whether or not either exists. We do not know whether or not the Universe is infinite, nor is it possible to know for sure, unless your eyes can see infinitely. Yet, infinity is used in mathematics and physics to denote a number greater than any real number. In other words, we can imagine that things go on forever, but we can't prove it, but it is still real in that it is recognized and used and has conceptual weight.

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.

God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.


How sad: "God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real" - the Christians have joined the Atheist, they too are from Mars ... the Planet.

I welcome disagreement. However, I haven't a clue what you are talking about.

 

[numan]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

Evil and pain exist, so God cannot be all-benevolent.

God cannot make a stone bigger than He can roll, so He cannot be omnipotent.

Gödel's Proof demonstrates that God cannot be omniscient.

Religious madmen always have some silly reason why a Good God would allow pain and suffering. A standard ploy is that God permits it in order that humans may have free-will. But a Good God who was also omnipotent AND all-knowing obviously could create a world free of suffering AND in which humans could have free will (presuming that free will is actually something worth having).

So the apologists for God are just peddling another load of tommy-rot.

The only way out of the problem (for them) is to admit that God is NOT all-powerful AND/OR not all-knowing.

They could weasel out by claiming that, as making a stone bigger than He could move involves a contradiction to the concept of an all-powerful God, it is a reasonable limitation on the power of God that He cannot do something which involves a logical contradiction -- like making a square circle. Then they could claim that a world without suffering involves a logical contradiction.

That would be fine -- if they could explain what the logical contradiction is. Since they have never figured out such a thing, they should not be surprised if some of us distrust their simple-minded notions of deity.

In the spirit of philosophical brotherhood, I will suggest a way that might save their notions of God from logical inanity. I warn you that it involves considerable knowledge of some of the most subtle and advanced areas of modern mathematics. You had better think carefully about the work of Gregory Chaitin, for example.

Perhaps it is logically impossible to predict the optimal history of an infinite universe a priori -- it would require an Infinite Mind greater than the infinity of all the orders of mathematical infinity.

So we may all play out our lives over and over in the Mind of God -- with some changes each time -- so that He may ultimately form an asymptotic approximation to the Optimum Universal History.

God need not thank me for my help -- I'm always willing to give a hand to a Deity who tries to make an honest effort.
.

 

[HUGGY]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

Evil and pain exist, so God cannot be all-benevolent.

God cannot make a stone bigger than He can roll, so He cannot be omnipotent.

Gödel's Proof demonstrates that God cannot be omniscient.

Religious madmen always have some silly reason why a Good God would allow pain and suffering. A standard ploy is that God permits it in order that humans may have free-will. But a Good God who was also omnipotent AND all-knowing obviously could create a world free of suffering AND in which humans could have free will (presuming that free will is actually something worth having).

So the apologists for God are just peddling another load of tommy-rot.

The only way out of the problem (for them) is to admit that God is NOT all-powerful AND/OR not all-knowing.

They could weasel out by claiming that, as making a stone bigger than He could move involves a contradiction to the concept of an all-powerful God, it is a reasonable limitation on the power of God that He cannot do something which involves a logical contradiction -- like making a square circle. Then they could claim that a world without suffering involves a logical contradiction.

That would be fine -- if they could explain what the logical contradiction is. Since they have never figured out such a thing, they should not be surprised if some of us distrust their simple-minded notions of deity.

In the spirit of philosophical brotherhood, I will suggest a way that might save their notions of God from logical inanity. I warn you that it involves considerable knowledge of some of the most subtle and advanced areas of modern mathematics. You had better think carefully about the work of Gregory Chaitin, for example.

Perhaps it is logically impossible to predict the optimal history of an infinite universe a priori -- it would require an Infinite Mind greater than the infinity of all the orders of mathematical infinity.

So we may all play out our lives over and over in the Mind of God -- with some changes each time -- so that He may ultimately form an asymptotic approximation to the Optimum Universal History.

God need not thank me for my help -- I'm always willing to give a hand to a Deity who tries to make an honest effort.
.

How dare you open up the "can of worms" that god is not honest!

 

[BreezeWood]

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real. Both are human constructs, yet nobody can prove whether or not either exists. We do not know whether or not the Universe is infinite, nor is it possible to know for sure, unless your eyes can see infinitely. Yet, infinity is used in mathematics and physics to denote a number greater than any real number. In other words, we can imagine that things go on forever, but we can't prove it, but it is still real in that it is recognized and used and has conceptual weight.

If you are an atheist, then no doubt you would find "God is real" wanting. God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.

God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.


How sad: "God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real" - the Christians have joined the Atheist, they too are from Mars ... the Planet.

I welcome disagreement. However, I haven't a clue what you are talking about.

Jimmy_Jam: If you consider me a fundamentalist Christian and want to argue as if I am one, I suppose you can.

my error' I read the above to quickly and believed you referenced yourself a Christian.


God is real in a similar way that the concept of infinity is real.


the Garden is the Physical Presence and Proof of Gods Existence -

is at least the reference of substance to the subject of Creation. There are no Mathematical laws or any other for the Construct of Biology, Living Matter or its Elements - speaking of Infinity.

the Atheists otherwise will freely enjoin their lives on the planet Mars as freely as their presence on Earth.

 

[The Irish Ram]

Yes, but like in any fairy tale, what is the lesson taught? What truth is conveyed?

Depends on the chapter and verse.

But who is to say there is any truth beyond the truth found in fairy tales?

Lets see what truth can be found first. Lets face it. As highly evolved, rational, and intelligent modern humans like to think of themselves here we are 5000 years later still trying with great difficulty to understand the identity of a talking snake in a fairy tale written for the children of who some people like to deride as ignorant superstitious nomads.


One truth beyond any truth found in fairy tales is that reality is much stranger.

Odd that the such highly evolved would start going backwards. Some scientists say we are devolving now. If that is the case, do you think at some point man will become a monkey again? Or is that just a monkey myth, and could never happen because a man could never turn into a monkey.....

It is your myth that a snake was talking to Eve.
According to scripture, she was seduced by a very charming, intelligent, convincing individual.
Snake is what he became.

 

[numan]

.
Why bring in monkeys?

Humans never stopped being apes.
.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Isn't God supposed to be omnipresent?

Evil and pain exist, so God cannot be all-benevolent.

God cannot make a stone bigger than He can roll, so He cannot be omnipotent.

Gödel's Proof demonstrates that God cannot be omniscient.

Religious madmen always have some silly reason why a Good God would allow pain and suffering. A standard ploy is that God permits it in order that humans may have free-will. But a Good God who was also omnipotent AND all-knowing obviously could create a world free of suffering AND in which humans could have free will (presuming that free will is actually something worth having).

So the apologists for God are just peddling another load of tommy-rot.

The only way out of the problem (for them) is to admit that God is NOT all-powerful AND/OR not all-knowing.

They could weasel out by claiming that, as making a stone bigger than He could move involves a contradiction to the concept of an all-powerful God, it is a reasonable limitation on the power of God that He cannot do something which involves a logical contradiction -- like making a square circle. Then they could claim that a world without suffering involves a logical contradiction.

That would be fine -- if they could explain what the logical contradiction is. Since they have never figured out such a thing, they should not be surprised if some of us distrust their simple-minded notions of deity.

In the spirit of philosophical brotherhood, I will suggest a way that might save their notions of God from logical inanity. I warn you that it involves considerable knowledge of some of the most subtle and advanced areas of modern mathematics. You had better think carefully about the work of Gregory Chaitin, for example.

Perhaps it is logically impossible to predict the optimal history of an infinite universe a priori -- it would require an Infinite Mind greater than the infinity of all the orders of mathematical infinity.

So we may all play out our lives over and over in the Mind of God -- with some changes each time -- so that He may ultimately form an asymptotic approximation to the Optimum Universal History.

God need not thank me for my help -- I'm always willing to give a hand to a Deity who tries to make an honest effort.
.

So we are little more than a soap opera bit part for the entertainment of a bored deity.

 

[numan]

So we are little more than a soap opera bit part for the entertainment of a bored deity.

I had a somewhat grander vision of the Drama of Creation.

But I can't say that your view is wrong. · ·
.

 

[Derideo_Te]

So we are little more than a soap opera bit part for the entertainment of a bored deity.

I had a somewhat grander vision of the Drama of Creation.

But I can't say that your view is wrong. · ·
.

We like to flatter ourselves that our puny fleeting existence is important to an immortal deity capable of creating an infinite universe. So if there is such a deity then we are probably just one of his absurd little jokes.

 

[HUGGY]

So we are little more than a soap opera bit part for the entertainment of a bored deity.

I had a somewhat grander vision of the Drama of Creation.

But I can't say that your view is wrong. · ·
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We like to flatter ourselves that our puny fleeting existence is important to an immortal deity capable of creating an infinite universe. So if there is such a deity then we are probably just one of his absurd little jokes.

It makes the "joke" all the funnier when the butt of the joke doesn't get it.

 

[numan]

It makes the "joke" all the funnier when the butt of the joke doesn't get it.

Darn!! You've figured out the secret of my postings on this board !! · ·
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