If you don't believe in evolution

[[deleted user]]

My entire family is religious and I am not. I am not allowed to tell my elders what I think, nor anyone younger than me, for fear I will turn them in the wrong direction. People in my family DO NOT LIKE ME because I am not a Christian. I am forced to go to church and listen to them preach to kids about how atheists are bad and need help and are essentially stupid for 'thinking they are right when they obviously aren't.' Not to mention the fact that religion plays a role in the government way more than it should. Do you realize it would be IMPOSSIBLE to become any elected official in the government unless you claimed to be religious? And it affects how people vote for things like prop 8, which logically should have been voted no on, but sadly, people voted yes for it. Many many other things, too.

Yeah. It affects me a lot.

[David]

Wow. Nathan and Dan completely destroy everything you say, but you're still completely caught up with this god of yours.

[Dan]

Tough love,

My point was that if you held God to the same standard to which you hold other people, you would not judge God as being so great. And, to be fair, in my example I am way too generous to God. To make the example more fair, after you finished walking home when your mom didn't pick you up, she would have to not be home when you got there. And never show up. And leave you with the mortgage payments. And so on.

and you put a penny in a bank account go back in 200 years you will have a lot of money but it didn't happen the next day.

The average interest rate for American savings accounts is currently 1.51%. If you put a penny in the bank and come back in 200 years, you will have twenty cents. Which would still be twenty cents more than God has given anyone.

[Lauren]

"Is it really God's role to help us if he existed?"

Yes. If you have the power to do something, to prevent evil, and you do nothing, you are just as guilty and evil and the person actually doing the act. That's why it's a crime in itself to watch a crime and not call for help.

[Dan]

Is it really God's role to help us if he existed?

Well, you've claimed that God helps people. And Christians of all stripes claim that God helps people. And God claims that God helps people. But, no, I don't have a problem with declaring all of those people liars.

again, tough love.

What does this mean? As far as I can tell, "tough love" is the same as "no love." Right now there is a man in Bangladesh working in a gas station who doesn't know me and whom I don't, and won't ever, know. His actions towards me are indistinguishable from God's. By your standard, he loves me. But it's tough love. Should I revere this man? Should I worship him?

If God was real is he personal?

This is kind of a ridiculous question. There are an infinite number of ways that God, or any other purely speculative entity, could exist. Billions of people the world over claim that a personal god does exist, so that is generally the type of god to which I refer. But, again, it's pretty ridiculous to ask me to define the characteristics of a being in whom I do not believe and for which there is no evidence, personal or not.

Many many religious people treat God in their lives as a personal god. But once an atheist raises an unanswerable question about this god, they respond by saying that, well, he's not a personal god. Whenever it's convenient for an argument, God loses all his characteristics.

So let's flip the question. Is God a personal God? Yes or no, what are his/her/its characteristics?

[Dan]

However if you are using the Bible again well, I think you already know my opinion.

Your opinion is ridiculous. Your opinion is that people can draw on the Bible to make claims but that I cannot, then, draw on that same Bible to assess or refute those claims.

Tough love to me is essential to parenting. It's never taken as love but sometimes not helping is the best way to help.

Huh? Nothing that parents do is "taken as love"? And this misses the point. Try holding God to the same standard to which you hold your parents. He would be a horrible parent. It's not a matter of "sometimes not helping is the best way to help." God never ever ever ever ever helps. He does absolutely nothing. Let's imagine you woke up in the woods as an infant. You taught yourself to walk, to find food, etc. You built yourself a shelter. You raised yourself to an adult. Did you have good parents? This is the kind of parenting God does: the nonexistent kind.

It's absolutely not, how can you not believe in something if you have no idea what it is? I don't think unicorns exists but for me to say that i have to understand what a unicorn is (or at least how I see a unicorn.)

Um, your thinking is entirely backwards. Do you believe in flargenolens? How about slinkopatters or rincoboodles? Certainly you believe in glinkopudjens, right? I mean, you have no idea what they are, so you'd be stupid to not believe in them, right?

I think God is personal but I don't think he can act/help us in the way we understand those two words. So if we can't comprehend God's understandings of those words we will never know how he helps us but rather just that he does.

So what purpose does this impotent God serve? As far as I can tell, the only characteristics that you ascribe to God are that he exists, and that he does not have any definable characteristics so that those characteristics cannot be assessed.

It's also a lie. You believe that God can help us, because you've said as much. But you then pull the common religious tactic of changing God's characteristics on the fly to keep him out of reach of criticism.

[Dan]

That's not my opinion at all, I don't base my wholly on Bible and neither should you.

I never said you based your _____ wholly on the Bible. There is nothing that I base wholly on the Bible. You forgot the key word in that sentence of yours, so it's hard for me to respond to this. ;^) But it's perfectly acceptable to use the Bible to refute claims about the Christian god.

You come to this conclusion that if God did exist he would not be a good parent because you can't see how he helped you.

No, my point is that you do not hold God to the same standard to which you hold other people. If you are going to praise God for having helped you despite having no evidence of his help, then you have to praise everyone, real or hypothetical, for having helped you in some mysterious way. This means that you have to praise, for example, me and Nathan for having helped you. Enjoy that one!

No matter if i am right I have to have an idea of what they (even if it's wrong) to reject the idea.

Ugh! You are completely wrong. First of all, your tactic to just make up definitions for my nonsense words is utter bullshit. If you cannot reject an idea that isn't at all articulated, then you must accept every single possible idea that does or could hypothetically exist. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Or, I guess, I could use your bullshit tactic and define God as "a volcano under my bed that spews marshmallows," and then easily reject it.

Your tactic is outrageously dishonest. You claim God exists. For any specific characteristic of God that I refute, you say, "Well, that characteristic doesn't apply to the real God." You then refrain from defining the characteristics of your god, and assert that since I don't understand your undefined god, I can't reject it.

I believe in things for which there is evidence. That is it. If a concept of God is presented to me for which there is solid evidence, I'll believe it. If a concept of God is described to me with characteristics, I will examine those characteristics to see if there is a justifiable reason to believe in this god. If someone says, "There exists a god whose characteristics cannot be known, and since you don't understand this god, you must accept that it exists because you can't refute what you do not understand," that person probably falls down a lot.

You don't need a reason to not believe in something. You need a reason to believe in something. That for which there is no reason to believe is not believed.

Just because i don't know all the fine details doesn't mean i shouldn't believe but just that I shouldn't assume anything i can't prove to myself.

It's not a matter of details. I couldn't give a shit about the details. You can't even state a single characteristic of God other than that (s)he/it exists, and you imply that this god is a good thing. And that's it. I'm sick of people claiming things about God, but when anyone tries to analyze these claims, suddenly God has no characteristics that can be analyzed or even discussed. From what I gather, having argued about God with countless people, the only characteristic God has is that he is whatever is necessary for a religious person to be right about X and for an atheist to be wrong.