Okay the fear of god is rediculous life should be
taken to the fullest and standing in church pray so that this being doesn't smite you and put you in the deapest first hole for eternety isn't living it's living in fear. Religon is Selfish even though it teaches not to be selfish if you again slice out all that bullshit fear and things not humanly possible or probable you might as well make The Grinch Who stole Christmas scripture because it isn't selfish. And SSReichsFurer by your reasoning we are just tools of this supernatural being and why would you want to believe that? Because you are selfish and you have been told that if you don't listen to the church and live a certian way you will be smiten down to the ground.

Denis I applaud your logic, thank you! Finally another atheist who enjoys life but despises the bullshit lies of religion as a means of mind control

@ Obi, you are now officially my favorite Jewish person despite your attack on atheism, I'll have to let my band friend at school know, he shall be so disheartened, your commentary is priceless with its distinct tone. Love it.

It's not that religon is lies it's most of it is. The churches go past the morals and go into detail about miracles when you could be saying oh we say this so that you can learn morals but no they say " oh well if he magically cured a lepar and walks on water he must be god". And then God himself is a problem...

And now some of my favorite Carlin quotes on Religion (mostly Catholocism):
1.I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.
2.We created god in our own image and likeness!

3. ***Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it, religion has actually convinced people that there's an INVISIBLE MAN...LIVING IN THE SKY...who watches every thing you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever 'til the end of time...but he loves you.
4.A man came up to me on the street and said I used to be messed up out of my mind on drugs but now I'm messed up out of my mind on Jeeesus Chriiist.
5.I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.

The possibility of God period is possible but not even probable. The fact that religion makes a fairy tale despot character out of the possible force of creation of the universe is a farse. Morals do not come from God, in fact they are relative to individual perception but for the most part are agreed upon as good, and its not because the Bible says they are, at least not for me, if we need guidebooks for everything, and if you look at religion and government (which deserve to be separate) I guess we do, then we're fucked as a species.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Crazy Anglican:

No, that's not quite what I mean- just writing books doesn't help, anyone, as you stated, can write books.

I'm saying that if in the first 2,000 years or so we had two Testaments come out, and THEY are both different and had the values of their time (Old Testament is how the world began, correspondingly its also about the birth and growth of the initial morals of man, and culminates with the Jews and Moses and all that- the first Pinnacle, you might say, the first real step foward as beings, we've gone from nothing just messing about and being smited for being terrible to finally having a good hero in Moses and what might be considered, then, as the first prototype for what man should be, the Jew in Moses' image, so to speak; New Testament is a response to IT'S time, so it's anti-Roman, anti-imperial, anti-all that... we go from Moses and the Jew and the first morals to Jesus, the Christian prototype, and the additional and strengthened ideals of patience, submission, love, peace... all that.)

It's been 2,000 years- we have grown since then, haven't we?

I say we have.

We've grown from Moses, we've grown from Jesus.

You actually brought up a point I LIKED- Aquinas. I don't agree with his ideas (obviously) but I DO love what he TRIED to do in furthering the idea... growing it.

You might go so far as to say we go Moses, Jesus, Aquinas and the Medevial monks/knights as a prototype of man for THAT time...

You see where I'm going with this. Man did NOT stop growing 2,000 years ago- so why should his canon of faith and his ability to have faith in the beyond stop there?

Im with you there Ottovabis, ive had it with the bloody tooth fairy, suicide bombing supporting allah, old white man in the sky telling people how to run their lives , bestiality pedo zeus, urgh the whole lot of those fairy tales.

thank you sean

Thucydides: You like the god who would order disobedient children to be stoned? The one who would wither a fig tree because how dare it be out of season? Your rant against atheists is ridiculously offensive and misinformed. Yeah, we can't know for sure that the dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago. We don't know for sure that the universe is 14 billion years old. We can't. But when available evidence overwhelmingly supports these ideas, when it all adds up, when there's no evidence for this god or that one, when we have such an effective naturalistic method of explaining biological diversity, why posit a god when you don't need one? Why should we assume that there's something more when we have no reason to believe there is? You say we have what "seems" to be the evidence; any evidence that isn't all there is? Furthermore, the non-believers I can only assume you're talking about (Dawkins, Hitchens, Pharyngula et al.) don't think that belief in YHWH-God-With-A-Capital-G™ All Rights Reserved is stupid. They don't scream irrationally at theists and the religious. They think that belief in gods and the supernatural is /harmful/, and while I won't deny that you've probably heard some heated words from some atheist or another I also think you're smart enough to know better than to generalize a very diverse group from three or four instances from the most hostile place in the world (the interwebs). I'd also mention something about stones and glass houses vis-a-vis screaming irrationally. It's also worth noting that atheism, agnosticism, and (secular) humanism are not mutually exclusive, and while I don't believe that we can ever know that gods don't exist, I do feel quite comfortable in my convictions that none do and that we as humans have this one life to do meaningful things.

atheists will bring a new secular age to mankind without much of the hypocrisy and superficiality that religion has inflicted. and if need be i will launch this movement. it will be a peaceful long revolution towards change

to do meaningful things where we define meaningful for ourselves instead of having it decided for us, thank you UOSnu

I like what ottovanbis here. I mean, if a being such as god exists, we would never have a way to detect him, if he didn't want us to. But I also want to add in the fact that I don't like scripture because I find it very... pessimistic, in relation to mankind's desire to be moral. Think about it, the bible says (albeit not outright) that we need an invisible man in the sky and his rules, if we are to not kill/rape/steal from one another. It assumes that without the threat of supernatural disciplinary measures, we would all revert to being savages, or something to that effect. And yet, we are created in His image.

And then, there is the question of God, himself. All beings have an origin. What was there before god? Or was there nothing? If that's the case, then how did He come into existence, without any provocation? We wind up with a russian doll situation as our best solution, but even then, we have problems. When you get to the biggest doll, you're left with the same question. And frankly, there needs to be a definite beginning, if there is to be a definite end. i.e. apocalypse.

Onar, there may be neither a definite beginning or a definite end though, that we also do not know, and are arrogant to assume, though I agree with what your saying about the assumption of God circumventing all logic

To answer the first question: Neither of my parents were ever particularly religious (I think my mom's family was Methodist, not sure about my dad's). After my father's schizophrenia ended my parents' marriage (and left him incapable of taking care of me) my mother decided to find religion. Starting when I was four or five she went to an American Zen Buddhist temple, and they had a day care/Sunday school of sorts that was less about dogma than nurturing values like empathy and compassion. Eventually my mom went less and less, I became somewhat disenchanted with it around age 13 or 14 when I realized that meditation was kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and I've been an atheist ever since. I was never raised in an Abrahamic religion and would think they are pretty silly if they weren't so destructive.

i think jesus christ was herodes' son: that's why he pretended to be king of jews

Well, I love Nietzsche... and now I find myself in his place: perhaps a bit undertsood.

I'm not speaking out against the "fairy tales" of the Bible- I said that some of those were GOOD (ex. Exodus as a sort of "Never give up, keep pushing on" story.) Whether those stories are true is another matter- they are legends, and there is always a root of truth in a legend- the Exodus DID happen, as did the Fall of the Roman Empire, and we can be reasonably sure Moses and Jesus did live... now whether Moses parted water or Jesus walked on it? THAT is proof vs. faith, and that's a seemingly unwinnable debate, because both sides have such a good defensive arguments ("That makes no logical sense/Where's the PROOF?" vs. "You can't disprove that it did happen/You must have FAITH.") that they stand each other off.

Wahat I speak out against is taking EITHER as the end of it; whether you're an atheist and saying "It didn't happen, the Jews/Christians/Muslims/Spongebobologists are wrong about all that God baloney, so it's obvious that there's no God or anything, no reason to look, let's just STOP" or "It did happen, and this is exactly how it happened, I learned it this way and that's the truth and the whole truth, I know it all, God and Jesus and all is true, so no reason to look farther, let's just STOP"...

IT'S STILL STOPPING!

When you think, in either case, you know it all, you forfeit any further knowledge that you might gain.

I get asked so many times, "What's the harm in just believeing in Jesus TO BE SAFE?" That way, if I'm right, great, and if I'm wrong, I've lost nothing."

If you're wrong, you HAVE lost something- your opportunity to find out what the truth is.

I don't know aht it is.
Your pastor/rabbi doesn't know what it is.
The Pope doesn't know what it is.
Richard Dawkins doesn't know what it is.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre- NONE OF THEM knwos what it is.

But we can build on each others ideas and grow... but OBLY if we accpet that there are still ideas to grow, and saying "This is IT" kills ideas on the spot.

At best this is jesus's real life story
Mary had sex with MAN ( random guy) but got married to Joseph and then to cover
it up and prevent her from being shunned from society or killed they said god fucked me! And then this crazy story goes on and on. So at best they were unknowingly the worlds greatests liars and con- artists.

I like the idea of preserving an open mind. Isn't that how most, if not all conflicts start? By not seeing the other side of what someone has to say?

Otto, I don't think at all that the "you must have faith" argument stands up to a simple "proof plx." What can be asserted without evidence can and will be dismissed without evidence, to paraphrase Hitchens. I don't think interested parties should stop looking for god(s), but I see no reason why I should look for something I truly don't expect to exist. This world IS it. Look for meaning, look for fulfillment, look to make the world a better place, but you won't find it in petrified Bronze Age dogmas about some mystical man in the sky.

@Onar:

I think we CAN prove a God to exist- but not at all what he is.

Take Spinoza's (agnostic, nearly atheistic) argument:

Everything is cause and effect- one thing leads to another to another to another, and so on. For example, you are reading these words, and that is an effect of my writing them, and my typing the keys on my laptop are the dierect cause for them appearing. The topic I chose to write about is an INdirect- it came from previous causes and effects, ie my learning Spinoza's theory.

NOW, since everything is cause and effect, we can trace those events BACKWARD. You can, in large part, recall the events in your life backward.

At some point, however, you reach an uncaused cause, something you yourself did not cause or have as an effect-

This is your birth.

This is NOT, however, a true uncaused cause, as someone gave birth to you, and THAT is the cause of which your life is the effect.

But trace back EVERYONE.

Go back through time- and eventually you will come to a first, uncaused cause. This can NOT be the Big Bang, as something caused that, what we don't know.

But you go back, and that uncaused cause defies logic- logically, everything is cause and effect- this was NOT, this was a cause with nothing prior to cause it.

THIS, Spinoza argues, must be something, then, that can bend logic, and/.or exist outside it-

And THIS, he says, MUST be a God, or a force, or SOMETHING greater that cannot be explained rationally, because what it did (existing without prior cause) is irrational.

So... there is a creator, something greater.

But WHAT and WHO it is we don't know.

obiwan: there r no archeological proofs about exodos. hope u have not watched the scientific-manipulation national geographic videos

Kalam™: Well this ball doesn't move without a push from something so clearly everything has a cause qed god exists.

The Kalam is a skyhook, a cop out, an statement that "well we don't know so let's make **** up instead of giving it an honest go." It's circular. "Everything that has begun to exist has a cause." "The universe began to exist" "The universe has a cause." But "everything" and "the universe" can only be non-equivalent if one supposes from the start that something exists "outside" of the universe, whatever that tripe means.

Furthermore, logic isn't as objective or as universal as you'd like to think. It's rooted inextricably in human experience, so let's not appeal to it like it's some impersonal arbiter of right and wrong.

I am god. Wazzup here?

"Otto, I don't think at all that the "you must have faith" argument stands up to a simple "proof plx." What can be asserted without evidence can and will be dismissed without evidence, to paraphrase Hitchens. I don't think interested parties should stop looking for god(s), but I see no reason why I should look for something I truly don't expect to exist. This world IS it. Look for meaning, look for fulfillment, look to make the world a better place, but you won't find it in petrified Bronze Age dogmas about some mystical man in the sky. " UOsnu, when did I ever say that I disagreed with this??? I don't disagree, I agree one hundred percent. To be 100% certain that there is no God is just as arrogant as believing that there is one, we do not know nor will we ever, I choose to make the assumption that without good enough evidence the God Delusion is a load of BS.

Dear UOSnu:

You clearly did not read my whole post. The God you described, for one thing, is the Old Testament God. Also, Christianity as currently practiced and as was historically practiced generally disgusts me, though it is interspersed with feats of great good, just as any other religion.

sorry obi, I don't think you understand what the Big Bang Theory is. That path of logic is obviously flawed as well.

Otto, could you please explain me? I am rather well-educated physicist and still do not understand this theory. Pleeease, explain?