"If you can prove God exists, I'll resign"

[UnseenParticipant]

President Duterte of the Philippines, who is famous for being a ruthless and lethal leader who approves of extra-legal executions and has, I believe, claimed to have done some himself, has come out as an atheist. (article)

Oh great. Proof that atheists have no moral compass.

From the article:

Duterte has faced criticism from the majority-Roman Catholic population for his comments about religion. Most recently, he was under fire for calling God “stupid.”

“Who is this stupid God? This son of a bitch is then really stupid,” he said in a speech last week. “You were not involved but now you’re stained with an original sin … What kind of a religion is that? That’s what I can’t accept, very stupid proposition.”

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Haha, let’s call him up and congratulate him! Can anyone imitate Trump’s voice or spoof his caller ID or twitter handle?

[Earle SanbornParticipant]

All I can say is this- when one contemplates the world in which we live: Sun, moon, stars, planets, the animals and plants of so many varieties yet each one is unique– many bear variations but still all bears; the plate tectonics; the air currents, water currents, etc. etc. then combine this vast array of life with this: Did the I-Phone evolve or was it created, tested, quality controlled, revised, and then manufactured? Did the watch on your arm just appear or did a fine watchmaker piece it together; is the Airbus just piled together or were there painstaking hours of engineers, scientists, etc. involved in it’s creation?  You know the answer. So the sun just happen to be 92 M miles away; our moon which is quite large as moons go when one investigates the universe but is just perfect for the sustaining of life (large life); most planets have microbial life; but we are talking large life- elephants, whales, lions, mankind.

Even the great Bertrand Russell stated that “It’s not that there’s not a “god” we just don’t want there to be a god so we can experiment sexually.” Quite the truth there. Most people like a “shirt-pocket god” that they create in their mind; it’s the rare individual that submits to the Eternal. Ask yourself why did Great Britain begin to rule the world and the adage “The sun never sets on the British Empire” in the 1700-1800s; then their younger brother nation the USA come on the scene in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase and has been the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Why these two brother nations? The answer lies within Genesis- treat yourself to letting The God of Abraham show you a thing or two like he did Job.

Regards

[JimParticipant]

I think God was invented by men, who created God in man’s image. We have that many religions in the world today, all making claim to having the sole truth. It just doesn’t add up in my way of thinking. I’m getting on in years now but I have never seen a demon, I have never seen an angel, I very much doubt if a Heaven or a hell exists in an afterlife, if an afterlife exists. That’s my take on it. Regards. Jim

[DavisModerator]

@Earle

Let’s go along with this purpose behind something that just wouldn’t happen to emerge:

The planet is hospitable and the ideal conditions are met. It was likely created. Except of course that the Earth is not particularly hospitable. Multiple ice ages, meteor impacts, near wipe out of all life and the threat of it happening again. Natural disasters. Limited resources. An evolution that led to humans murdering each other in the millions. The neighbouring outer-space is without oxygen, freezing cold, full of dangers and hard to reach.

Wow. It’s almost as though there has to be an amazing all powerful perfect God to create such a glorious world that remarkably allows grand manking to emerge from such intelligent evolution.

Except of course that evolution itself is not remotely intelligent. As much as creatures can highly adapt to some enviroments (most species do not last), they are also full of tons of flaws, really really bad bad bad evolution which for a percentage of the population leads to debilitating agony, blindness, still births, inability to move. They are carry overs or stopgap-like measures that made the best of a bad situation like optical nerves and vestigal organs. And the millions (or is  it thousands?) of years it  took for man to emerge…was an endless chain of animals eating each other, the majority of creatures living in fear and meeting an ugly death. Surely these amazing incredible conditions must have been engineered by an epic being in the sky. Its so magestic it had to have been created by someone ginormously wow!

And then there is the rest of the universe. Billions of billions of stars. All lifeless? Burning raging suns filled with blasting energy, burning away, at distances we cannot hope to ever reach, there for no purpose, perhaps so the night sky looks pretty and makes constellations (of course we only see a fraction of those stars and galaxies but why the hell not have billions of useless unobservable stars???). This all makes sense. Some divine being created an unspeakably enormous place and picked one tiny round rock and produced just the right enviroment  for beautiful amazing graceful animals to emerge, all of them chewing on bamboo, and eventually man, who frolics and prospers in the bounties given to them by a perfect all powerful amazing God. It just had to be God. The God of a 2500 year old book. The God your parents happened to believe in.

Or

The cold truth, in such an  enormous universe emergent life is a near inevitability and we live periously on the edge of disasters and brutally inhospitable enviroments, for many people a cruel miserable existence from a badly emerged evolution full of ignorance and superstition with an enormous propensity for suffering and for the most part of history an inability to overcome it. That’s the cold hard unpleasant truth, the kind for adults. It is grotesque to think a God would have created this. Facing up to this reality is the most important step man-kind can make and our only ticket to overcoming the horror of a life a third of the world lives and difficult lives for another third and sort of okay enough of the time for the other third.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  Davis.

[StregaModerator]

@davis thanks for bothering to take the time to post such a well structured response.  +1

@earlesanborn welcome to Atheist Zone, where theists like yourself are given space and room to make goddish claims without getting booted.  Out of curiosity, what inspired you to join an atheist site?

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@Earle Sanborn, Welcome to the site.

Even the great Bertrand Russell stated that “It’s not that there’s not a “god” we just don’t want there to be a god so we can experiment sexually.”

I am reasonably familiar with his works but I was not aware he said that. Could you please reference the work or talk where he said that line.

[Earle SanbornParticipant]

No my mom and dad really didn’t believe much. My dad was a USMC helicopter pilot in Vietnam and did two tours; he’d make Lt. Col. but they wanted another tour in Nam. I was 5-9 years old then; found out much later that helicopter pilots had the least survival rate of all. My dad was hard yet just- I know that doesn’t fly now days.

My mom took us to a local Episcopalian church where nothing made sense to me. Years later I found that what passes for Christianity is an amalgamation of  Christianity, pantheism, paganism, greek and roman mysticism- how in the world do you get rabbit eggs for Easter (Astarte) and call in Christian? you don’t.

We do live in the Habitable Zone-

The Goldilocks Zone refers to the habitable zone around a star where the temperature is just right – not too hot and not too cold – for liquid water to exist on an planet.

Liquid water is essential for life as we know it. Where we find liquid water on Earth we also find life.

“The only life we know about is our carbon-based life, and water plays a crucial part in our own existence, and so it’s only natural that we direct our attention to planets in locations capable of having liquid water,” Professor John Webb of the University of New South Wales said.

There are at least a dozen or so potentially habitable exoplanets, planets which are in varying degrees similar to Earth.
Professor John Webb
“There’s plenty of life on Earth and there’s plenty of water, but we’ve yet to find life on other planets even in our own solar system.”

Looking for planets in the Goldilocks Zone is a way that allows scientists to hone in their search for Earth-like planets that could contain life.

___________

Davis, I get what you’re saying about even today most people live in poverty, no running water, wars, chaos, etc. Their “Bucket List” is having one meal a day.

May I suggest that the world in which we find ourselves was started by the Eternal, but has been ruled by Lucifer all these years. It was given to him to govern. I hope no one serious believes that the spirit realm doesn’t exist. Say goodbye to electricity- can’t see that either but yet it exists. It’s more real than this temporary physical world in many ways.

It’s quite clear that Lucifer and his angels are in charge here on Earth which is why I say this is not God’s world.

It’s also clear that all animal life isn’t perfect; we certainly aren’t; nor were we meant to be. We were created like every other animal– and He breathed life into them and they became a living being- there’s no dichotomy in man (some say the real you waffles up to heaven or takes the elevator to hell). We were made physical and subject to death like any other living creature; yet we have a mind to contemplate things; whereas animals are largely governed by instinct.

Have to go

No man has been to heaven and no man is in Dante’s hell) my mom and dad are simply dead and know nothing. They are reincarnated, they aren’t rolling around in Catholic heaven or boiling in Catholic hell.

 

[Anonymous]

I wonder how many times this has been debated in back alleys. I keep thinking about how religions, then and now, would kill someone for blasphemy and heresey (sp).   Then I am reminded of on of the ten commandments. Thou shall not kill.  I have to laugh. Someone please prove to me there is one religion without hypocrites. Let alone proving there is a great, magical, all-knowing, all seeing entity.

[Earle SanbornParticipant]

All, I’m wrong about Bertrand Russell, it was Aldous Huxley —

Furthermore “liberation, sexual and political” is an inconsequent interpretion. A consequent interpretion would be either “liberation, sexual and from unjustice” or “liberation, moral and political”, but it is obvious from the context that the liberation was mainly political.It is true that Huxley talks about erotic freedom in the chapter, but that has not to do with being able to do what you want sexually, but that science does not concern emotions and passions. The philosophy of meaningless can therefore not concern human passions:

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error — the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality. (p. 267)

It is not a direct quote, but if someone really believes that life ultimately has no purpose or meaning then as stated above “furthering the ends of political and erotic passion”.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Earle Sanborn wrote:

It’s quite clear that Lucifer and his angels are in charge here on Earth which is why I say this is not God’s world.

I suppose if we could prove that, it’d be easier to prove that God also exists. After all, the premise is that God’s in control of everything, right? So then, why does He allow so much evil and suffering, unless He’s an asshole? But it might also explain how He allowed Muhammad to set us up with Islam, and how He allows cults like ISIS to be so cruel.

By the way I was humoring you with the purported “He” characterization, and the Bible is yet another mostly fictional device used by men to rule over others of the poor and uneducated masses. There are a lot of good reasons to assume Christianity is really just Judaism 2.0 to keep up with changing civilization. And I’ll bet that’s why you’re not even trying to prove that God exists.

Now, even if God could be proven to exist, Science might be able adjust accordingly. Meanwhile, scientists worth their salt aren’t even interested in disproving the existence of God. Not even if they’re unusually horny on most days.

[_Robert_Participant]

Earle, when you said…

We were made physical and subject to death like any other living creature; yet we have a mind to contemplate things; whereas animals are largely governed by instinct.

How far back are you going? Neanderthals were not able to “contemplate things”..oh really? Even though certain groups of our own species appear to carry some of their DNA ?

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/

I know many Christians believe in the undefinable human soul and in evolution. I just can’t seem to get them to tell me exactly when the soul entered the picture. And none of them will even consider that a dung beetle has a soul. But their pet dog, well just maybe. It’s a fairy tale of a world view.

[UnseenParticipant]

Earle Sanborn wrote:

All I can say is this- when one contemplates the world in which we live: Sun, moon, stars, planets, the animals and plants of so many varieties yet each one is unique– many bear variations but still all bears; the plate tectonics; the air currents, water currents, etc. etc. then combine this vast array of life with this: Did the I-Phone evolve or was it created, tested, quality controlled, revised, and then manufactured? (blah, blah, blah)\

You don’t come into a group of atheists and trot out the watchmaker argument. LOL

A watch is complicated and can’t have just happened, so it must have had a designer. By analogy, the universe, is complicated and majestic as well, and so it must have a designer. Even more complicated and majestic than the universe is God himself. So who then is God’s designer?

Oh, I see, God just is…

You quoted Bertrand Russell, as though he might have been a friend to theism. He was not. In fact, somewhere in his wonderful book, Why I Am Not A Christian, he points out that the Christian believes that God just is, without a cause. Well, in that case he continues, it’s more economical to believe that if anything can exist, it might as well be the universe. No need for God.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by  Unseen.

[DavisModerator]

It’s quite clear that Lucifer and his angels are in charge here on Earth which is why I say this is not God’s world.

Earl. That makes no sense. Absolutely zero sense. God apparantly created everything. He spent seven days making everything. He created Satan. To say God is not responsible for what happens on Earth and what Satan does is ridiculous. All you have done with this terrible argument is create a boogey man. A scape goat. It’s really the only logical argument you can make. Because any objective view in the world would show that the supposed God created an inhospitable, brutal enviroment where suffering is common and misery abound. And yet…its a perfect loving kind all knowing all amazing God. The only way you could ever fill in that enormous hole is to do “the devil done that”. That isn’t an argument. Thats waving your hand an inventing an excuse.

Suffering. God didn’t do that. The devil did

Unfairness, lack of justice, pointless cruelty, murder and rape: The devil did it.

Adam Sandler movies: The devil did it.

It’s on Satan. Not God. Of course, God created Satan, everything about him…but God is not responsible for the horror that comes out of him.

It would be like doing a really good genetic modification to create a violent vicious manipulative huge dog and let it loose in a neighbourhood. He dog will hurt, bite, possibly kill, create total mayhem and suffering, not to mention the psychological problems of the person who has to shoot it dead before it kills anyone more. We made the dog. We brought it up. We let it loose. We did nothing to stop the dog. And yet, if we are to take your God claim seriously, we aren’t responsible for the horror that dog unleashes. Its the dogs responsibility. It’s all on it.

Yeah right.

You first make an argument that its simply too outrageous that such a hospitable amazing envioment on Earth exists to allow the miracle of life…to be just random. And then when I point out how not amazing and hospitable it is along with horror and cruelty your God created and let happens you do: “Satan did it”. Yuck. Gross.

[UnseenParticipant]

“It’s quite clear that Lucifer and his angels are in charge here on Earth which is why I say this is not God’s world.”

It doesn’t matter: we don’t have free will anyway whether God or Lucifer is in charge.

[Author]

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