For many people the case against God seems pretty watertight - but is it?
Why should issues of good and evil, or human suffering, cause any problems? If certain philosopher’s are right to dismiss man as ‘a curious accident in a backwater’, why should it matter in the least whether lives are ended slowly or suddenly, peacefully or painfully, one by one or en masse?
If the Oxford professor Peter Atkins, another dogmatic atheist, is right to call mankind ‘just a bit of slime on a planet’, why should we be remotely concerned at the systematic slaughter of six million Jews or half a million Rwandans? Are we traumatized when we see slime trodden on or shovelled down a drain?
There is no case against the LORD God Almighty. He made us and as with the Biblical reference to the potter we don’t ask the potter ‘why did you make me so?’ God can do absolutely anything He wishes. He is from everlasting to everlasting.
The Holocaust was a terrible, systematic slaughter, as you say. It was committed by men on men. The same with Rwandans. The wickedness of mankind that is not checked by the understanding God’s ways is evident in these horrific tragedies. It is us as people who do not intervene, it is people who encourage others into hatred and violent actions. There will be judgement on such people.
The LORD God set His standards in the Ten Commandments and mankind has broken them ever since. The first tablets of stone with these commandments were broken by Moses when he found that in his absence the people had made a golden calf and worshipped that and it seems, had an orgy while they were about it. A second set of stones was written on by God. Do people keep these commandments?
If not, who do they blame? Always they pass the blame on to something or someone else, usually they blame the LORD God Himself. Where does such foolishness end?
The Lord Jesus Christ taught that men should obey his Father’s commandments and that if they would only love God and each other the rest would fall in place. So, do they let these precepts rule their lives? Some try to, many do not.
Blaming God is not the solution to anything. Trust God totally and your life will be transformed. xx
Just because humanity is seemingly accidental, in terms of evolution, doesn’t mean that we don’t have feelings and emotions. We feel pain, and nobody should feel that, regardless of how we came about.
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Atheist
Peter Atkins is a doooshe’
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Because we can think. We DON’T matter to anything but ourselves. But because we can use abstract reasoning (well…some of us can) we have both empathy and fear of our own mortality and fragility.
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What is watertight is there is no evidence FOR a god. Until there is, there isn’t even a debate because one side isn’t even showing up.
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check out the fallacy of argument of truth from ‘goodness’.
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We are only concerned about the death of the Jews because a similar fate might befall us if we don’t learn the lessons and try to understand why.
In the case of slime then millions of slime cells may die, but it does not affects us as humans and could not be anticipated so to do, so us humans are not worried about it.
How do you know god does not exist - we aint proved nothing.
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Well, just because your atheist doesn’t mean you can’t have respect for life. People who think it’s ONLY the concept of God that makes killing bad scare me, quite frankly.
Human suffering causes problems because, obviously, it causes suffering. Humans developed empathy . . . mirror neurons and all . . . we can take the pain we see in others and relate to it. This is how the "Golden Rule" came about. We are a social species, so this obviously helped us along.
Life is still life. And we are aware. Ending the awareness of another for no reason at all isn’t good. As we wouldn’t like that to happen to us.
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They don’t give mankind very much credit do they?
Souls dying singularly or en masse do affect our Creator, and He does care.
Certain roles must be played to the ending of Prophesy, that’s just the way it is.
I for one am grateful I don’t live in a country where human life means nothing.
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it’ll all be played out in the end..the creation does’nt criticize the Creator.
so what your saying is without surveillance by some magic man in the sky you’d go around killing and raping people at random for kicks?that is some morality, oh and those slaughters you mentioned were either precipitated by religious belief or allowed by followers of a particular faith, in fact many Roman Catholic clergy members were complicit in both those tragedies
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Feelings an emotions.
If you see a picture of a hungry child in a far off country it tugs on your heart strings doesn’t it? We’re not taught that’s how we should feel we just feel it.
We feel pain and it hurts & if you love someone would you want them to feel any pain? No. That’s why it matters dumbass.
We may be ‘a curious accident in a backwater’ but that doesn’t mean we should sit back & starve does it?
We might as well make the most of the time we have here.
You are an idiot of the highest degree.
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Most people are not concerned enough to intervene to prevent other people’s suffering, whether they are theists or not. In Christianity God grants man free will, but also acknowledges man as weak.
The case against god is only watertight for people who have difficulty in accepting simple logic.
It is impossible to prove that there is no god. That is a certainty. It is equally impossible to prove that a God exists.
What I find particularly idiotic about extereme athiests is that they reject the possibility of any god without properly defining what God is.
To them I put forward this argument …
If just one person believes in God, then God exists for that person. Therefore God exists.
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Keddaw is proof of the faulty logic of extreme athiesm
"The case against god (or gods) runs as follows: There is no evidence for any gods, the universe seems to run fine without any interference from a higher power so even if there were gods they don’t seem to play a part in our day to day lives so why bother with them?"
Physicists established a century ago that we do not and can not ever fully understand how the universe works. All theists would equally argue that there is evidence of divine interference in the world. It can only ever be a matter of perception, not something which can be proven either way.
"The argument against religion is much stronger: There have been thousands of religions, only one can be correct."
Exactly the same can be said of scientific theories.
"Most religions have holy books, they all contradict themselves therefore they are not infallible."
They don’t all contradict themselves and few religious people see them as perfect accounts. There are no shortage of bad mistakes in science books, but I do not reject science because of them.
"None of the books offer insight into the universe or the human condition that could not have been thought up by a human of that time."
And your point is? If a man cannot understand something then how could he record it? why would he bother recording it? and why would any god give him the information in the first place?
"None of the books gives us a decent moral guide. The Bible (and Qur’an I think) says slavery is OK"
The Bible clearly doesn’t endorse slavery. Jesus’s message in the Bible is crystal clear, "treat people like you would like them to treat you".
"Surely the argument about why we should be concerned at the slaughter of innocents should be aimed at religion. According to them they have gone to meet their god, to be happy for eternity. It is only the non-believer that should have an issue with the deaths of all those people. It is only the non-believer that see a loss, the religious think they have gone to a better place."
Theists might argue that they are concerned not only with the slaughtered but with the souls of those that did the slaughtering.
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It’s because we are human and humans are social animals, so we don’t like the idea of other humans suffering.
For Hitler to get the Germans to carry out the holocaust against the Jews he had to dehumanise them first. The gas chambers were set up not because the Germans were trying to save bullets, but because the soldiers on execution duty were suffering from traumatic stress.
It’s similar to soldiers, while in the army they are brutalised by the army culture to make sure they have no qualms in attacking an enemy. That seems to be the way in every country I’v met soldiers from.
If there is a god that created this universe, why would he care how we behave? Caring about suffering is a purely human response.
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No it isn’t, life is amazing and incomprehensible.
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The philosophers who were emphatically believers in God and Ethics (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) did not invert knowledge the way moderns do.
You quote people who give physics priority over meta-physics (I am using in the sense Aristotle does).
The curious accident and the slime are all from a badly constructed biology theory. Too bad.
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The case against god (or gods) runs as follows: There is no evidence for any gods, the universe seems to run fine without any interference from a higher power so even if there were gods they don’t seem to play a part in our day to day lives so why bother with them?
The argument against religion is much stronger: There have been thousands of religions, only one can be correct. If you think you know which religion is right is there any proof? No, it’s all down to faith. Most religions have holy books, they all contradict themselves therefor they are not infallible. None of the books offer insight into the universe or the human condition that could not have been thought up by a human of that time. None of the books gives us a decent moral guide. The Bible (and Qur’an I think) says slavery is OK, this has been argued away as it was the custom of the day. So what? It is wrong and should have been laid out as such for the followers.
People of all kinds have empathy and sympathy. They also have a fear of "what if it was me" and so we do not like to see others suffering, other animals, never mind other humans. We have an interest in good and evil as we want the best world for ourselves, our children, our friends and our species.
Surely the argument about why we should be concerned at the slaughter of innocents should be aimed at religion. According to them they have gone to meet their god, to be happy for eternity. It is only the non-believer that should have an issue with the deaths of all those people. It is only the non-believer that see a loss, the religious think they have gone to a better place.
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Shroud of turin,,,atheists say show me proof,,theres the proof.
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http://www.shroud.com/meacham2.htm
I think Peter Atkins was speaking metaphorically. Most life on this planet is of course infinitely more complex than the organism he’s describing, but essentially he’s right. We are the product of a primordial soup that just happened to be in precisely the right conditions for the very rare and exceptional thing called life to appear and evolve.
I see nothing wrong with bouncing ideas around so as to encourage debate, as Mr. Atkins has done. Often the best way to defend an established idea is to know how to attack it. Take human rights for example…we all assume we have rights, but who says so ? None of us have any choice over our gender, where or when we are born or who we are born to, but we all assume that as soon as we come kicking and screaming into this world we automatically have rights. In truth, we have nothing. We’re all a part of nature and we’re all victims to it just like everything else. The concept of human rights has only evolved with our social and political sciences, and it’s certainly not a concept that’s evenly spread throughout the world.
I’m not an atheist, I’m agnostic. I believe in science, and I believe everyone has the right to worship whichever religion they choose. I find it deeply disturbing however when there are people out there that would deny solid scientific teaching to children because it goes against what was written in the bible nearly 2000 years ago, by men who, like themselves, evidently had an agenda.
We’ve already demonstrated perfectly how wrong the bible was on many counts. Why can’t people adapt their religious beliefs to what science has taught us today ? Surely not all Christians still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, so why can’t they accept evolution in the face of the overwhelming evidence ?
Science still can’t precisely answer what happened before the big bang, and who’s to say that life’s ability to evolve isn’t a power granted by some greater ‘creative entity’, which some might indeed call God. My conclusion ? There’s still plenty room for God in the world of science, if you so choose. People just need to learn to adapt their idea’s.
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Let me try to present my case; I am an atheist, but having said that, I would not deny anyone their religious beliefs, these are purely a personal thing. However, looking back into history, religion, in its many forms and guises, has been, and still is, the biggest single cause of more death, conflict, misery, persecution and slaughter the world has ever seen. Forget World War 1 & 2, forget the Korean War, the Crimean War, etc, these were, by religious standards, small, short-term political conflicts. Think instead of the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, where Protestants & Catholics have been in a state of bloody and violent strife for centuries, think of the situation in Iraq & Iran, where Sunni & Shi’ite muslims are still fighting for supremacy after centuries of bloodshed. And yet, the various and many so-called ‘Holy Men’, the many and so-called ‘men of peace and love’ among us, still insist on the concept of a magnanimous and all-seeing, all-caring ‘god’ under the multitudinous names that are used for this (mythical) entity. Good and evil will always exist in mankind, but perhaps we should be realistic and call these mindsets by their true names - greed, envy, lust and ambition. These are factors that have nothing to do with who or what you pray to or for, but have everything to do with the fact that some people want to rule others, some people want to have more money or property than others, some people want total power over others. With or without "GOD" this will never change.
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There is no case against the LORD God Almighty. He made us and as with the Biblical reference to the potter we don’t ask the potter ‘why did you make me so?’ God can do absolutely anything He wishes. He is from everlasting to everlasting.
The Holocaust was a terrible, systematic slaughter, as you say. It was committed by men on men. The same with Rwandans. The wickedness of mankind that is not checked by the understanding God’s ways is evident in these horrific tragedies. It is us as people who do not intervene, it is people who encourage others into hatred and violent actions. There will be judgement on such people.
The LORD God set His standards in the Ten Commandments and mankind has broken them ever since. The first tablets of stone with these commandments were broken by Moses when he found that in his absence the people had made a golden calf and worshipped that and it seems, had an orgy while they were about it. A second set of stones was written on by God. Do people keep these commandments?
If not, who do they blame? Always they pass the blame on to something or someone else, usually they blame the LORD God Himself. Where does such foolishness end?
The Lord Jesus Christ taught that men should obey his Father’s commandments and that if they would only love God and each other the rest would fall in place. So, do they let these precepts rule their lives? Some try to, many do not.
Blaming God is not the solution to anything. Trust God totally and your life will be transformed. xx
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The dam will break soon!
Praise the Lord God!
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There is something in the heart that knows that what we can see is not all that there is. We intuitively know that it is not our belief that makes something true or not…but that truth is something inherent. We know that we have meaning, even if we do not know what that is.
So we have the problem of the atheists who want to believe that we are "only" an animal, that we have no purpose, that there is no absolute truth…mostly to ‘cast off’ the morality of religion and do whatever seems good to us…but we just can’t live our lives like that.
So we know that the Holocaust is significant. That human life is inherently more valuable than pond scum. And we know that there is truth. This makes us uncomfortable with the foolishness of saying we are just an accident of nature, actors in a meaningless play, ‘…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
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