I would appreciate if you didn't put words into my mouth.
I never intended it as putting words in your mouth. I probably should have worded it better.
First of all, I don't believe God can be said to have committed "mass genocide." If God is the creator of life in all forms, he has the ability and the right to take it away. Humans have no such right because it is not their creation, and that is where we derive the fact that murder and genocide are inherent evils. Secondly, God does not cause people suffering. If anything, God took on suffering himself and created the means to the end. Which leads us to...
Yeah, I wonder what motives statements like that. Even if God did directly, deliberately, and with furious anger bring about the death of many people, it can in no way be classified as "genocide".
Reason or right makes no difference. In the Bible God did cause suffering and commit genocide among many other things that we would regard as atrocities.
Okay I'm just going to stop here for a second to clarify something.
You can't sit here with facts and PROVEN history and say God committed mass genocide. Honestly, you are as blind as ****.
It seems far more blind to sit here with facts and PROVEN history and say god is definitively real. I'm not making this claim. I'm making the statements of the Bible for the sake of argument.
Many Christian believe these thing really did or at least part of it really did happen and do not regard them as just moral stories. Even if you say it's just stories this god is based on these stories, which really makes no sense when looked at in that point of view but anyway...
What do I really think? Sure god didn't really commit genocide because he isn't real. I have seen no proof that this god of the Bible exists and have been offered no reason to believe as such. With in the context of the Bible as I am arguing. Gods a genocidal sadistic @#%&! With only the new testament God coming close to seeming anything like this view of god today. However if your claim is that the god of the old and new testament is one in the same, then you have to take into account his action of the old testament.
It certainly doesn't give you reason to insert red herrings meant to inflame me into losing my head. Rather, the new covenant gives us reason to bear a temporary state of evil until the judgment has passed.
Given your response to this question I'm not quite sure how the question is fallacious.
Given your response to this question I'm not quite sure how the question is fallacious. It also wasn't meant to get you to lose your head.
However I don't think I did a very good job at getting to my point with this. If we are to regard the Bible as true God seems to be very interactive with us in the past. Today seems to be a very different story. God in todays world seems to have turned a blind eye to everything. While in the Bible he was very interactive and participated in both positive and negative things.
When you go to a public school, most of the time they don't have this. As for the other stuff, well i dont live in america, but thats more based upon your founding fathers. Who believed devotely in God. But i do understand how it can make you feel like its going against your religion and singling you out (which is no right).
Yeah I know they don't have creationism in the class room in most cases however it hasn't stop people from continuing to try to get it there. Actually the whole thing on the founding fathers is not quite accurate and "in god we trust" and "under god" were later additions. Really I fond the removal of these things to be rather small potatoes when compared to other issues. Finally I don't have a religion. As a more popular YouTube Atheist has said atheism is as much of a religion as not collecting stamps is a hobby.
But again the point im trying to make is that religions are based solely off of faith. Sure there can be many stories (like in the bible) showing how God and Jesus and the holy spirit are relevant in your life every day. But to trust these stories, and believe full heartedly that this all is true requires alot of faith.
The thing it to use the Bible as a moral guide you have to completely disregard large parts of it and reinterpret it to such a degree that it no longer saying what is really written. Are there good moral lessons in there? Yes. But for every moral you find in it I can find a dozen atrocities.
As for this religion stuff, its not meant be fully factitous... Not even close. Its meant to be a way to live life, and love everyone around you without becoming a bad person. Its a bunch of laws that your religion sets to make sure you follow laws in society, and follow the "good" in life. What athiests have wrong in this, is that religions aren't supposed to be made up of facts... Its meant to be about faith...
How wise is it to take things based solely on faith?
I would like to use my invisible elephant example here.
What would you do if I told you an invisible flying elephant was going to come by a wreck your house if you don't move it? Would you just take what I say on faith or would you want proof this elephant really existed first?
What if I showed you pictures of other destroyed houses and said the elephant wrecked them. But when you actually look further into these you find other causes for the houses to be wrecked such as tornadoes. Worse yet some of the photos were only photoshops. Would you still believe me on faith?
After exposing my photos as tornadoes and fakes I tell you it's only a story so your prepared for storms, but the invisible flying elephant is real.
Well its more like this. You don't get to see the pen. You have no idea what it looks like, or what colour it is. But someone tells you its red, and then a community of people tells you its red. Making you trust and have faith that it is a red pen, and then there are stories and etc etc... (kinda makes it sound retarded but atm its the only analogy i can think of haha)... Anyways thats kinda like what christianty (and most religions) are like... But with a God of course.
I hope this scenario give you an idea of why an atheist thinks the way they do. Just replace the pen with god and I hope you can see why all an atheist asks for is proof before believing.
Let me end this on a more positive note since some of you seem to be getting a bit hot under the collar. I would like to say you have done great jobs at making your stances on this debate.
nonconformist you said you were Catholic? I wish I could have had a chance to meet more Catholics like yourself. My experience with people in that religion has for the most part, not been very pleasant. Even before I was an atheist.
