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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Armin Navabi
Slavery isn't the only questionable practice condoned in the Bible. The death penalty was also wielded quite liberally in biblical times, and death was a popular punishment for sins in the Old Testament, including violations such as adultery (Leviticus 20:10), homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13), lying about virginity (Deuteronomy 22:13-21), breaking the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14-15), cursing your parents (Exodus 21:17) and more.
The Quran also advocates beating wives when they misbehave:
If morality truly stemmed from an all-powerful deity, it would not change over time.
Most religions claim an all-powerful, all-loving benevolent deity. However, physical reality often contradicts this claim. Terrible things happen to people every day. Children die tragically young, natural disasters wipe out whole communities and people die from accidents and disease. These do not suggest a righteous and compassionate god. These suggest that God is either powerless, cruel or non-existent.
An all-loving god would surely not damn his children to an eternity of torture simply for being born into a culture that believes in the wrong deity, follows the wrong holy book or attends the wrong type of church services.
When something good happens to a believer, believers often attribute that to God. When a disaster occurs, believers often explain that God's will is mysterious and cannot be comprehended by mortals.
These two claims are in opposition; if God's will cannot be comprehended, how do we know that he has good intentions at all?
Ultimately, moral standards, as we understand them, are social constructs. They are tied intimately to cultural circumstances and can change over time.
Those who knew ended up suffering more complications, possibly due to the additional stress it caused. Being told that a high number of people are praying for your recovery might increase how severe you would perceive your illness to be and thus negatively affect your recovery.
To date, there have been no reputable scientific studies showing any clear link between prayer and healing.
To enter Heaven as a Christian, you must be “saved” by believing in Jesus as your savior (The Bible: John 3:18-36, 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10 and Revelation 21:8). According to some verses in the Quran, non-Muslims will end up in Hell (The Quran 3:85, 4:56, 5:72-73, 7:50, 17:97-98, 98:6). All of this means that belief in God alone is not sufficient to enter Heaven.
Remember, also, that not every religion supports the idea of Heaven and Hell. If the “right” god came from a religious tradition without such an afterlife, Pascal's wager ceases to work.
Moreover, believing in God simply to avoid the punishment of Hell is an empty type of belief. Surely, an all-knowing god could identify this insincerity and reward only true believers, not those who worshiped just to avoid consequences.
If everything requires a creator, why doesn’t God? And if God does not require a creator, why must everything else?
Because, you lower-level atheist, god is not a "thing" that is been created.
No one commits mass murder in the name of theism or atheism alone. Additional dogmatic principles are needed to justify such grisly outcomes.
Such actions or any other action, both good and bad, do not and cannot speak for atheism in general, as no two atheists necessarily hold any of the same beliefs or convictions about the world.
Totalitarian regimes are built on dogma and fear, not freedom of speech and inquiry. In this way, they greatly resemble religion. In effect, these leaders essentially created religions and inserted themselves at the top as new deities.
They only suggest that people are at their most irrational when frightened, in pain or delirious.The intense fear of death may drive some to accept illogical or irrational views out of desperation for comfort or a way to relieve or lessen their intense anxiety.
As the logic of this argument goes, we have no way of knowing whether we’re actually brains in vats; therefore, we have no way of knowing anything else about our world. Since this claim is in no way testable, however, we have no way of proving it and no reason to believe that it’s true. We can only live in the reality we can observe, not a hypothetical reality that we have no way of proving. To do otherwise would be insane.
Science doesn’t claim to have absolute certainty about the world; it creates models that provide the best explanation based on the available evidence.
Time and again, the scientific method has, more consistently than any other method, been successful at providing explanations with very accurate predictive power for our universe. This can easily be seen in the success of technological advancements in the past century and has justified belief in the stability of natural laws.
