Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne

Gits_bone wrote: »

I don't believe God created the world.

But who knows if there is something there? Lots of people with near death experiences say they rise above the room and look back down at the body.

You know when you have a fever, are real sick at night and are raving.........

Penn wrote: »

Eve ate the apple, causing humans to be born sinners.

Jesus came and died for our sins, something which emanated directly from Original Sin (Adam & Eve).

If Adam & Eve weren't real, then Jesus' death did not save us from anything. Plus if Adam & Eve weren't real, then it wasn't the free will of man which resulted in man being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, thereby causing sin, sickness, disease, evil and ultimately death, but rather it means that God himself created man with all of these things. Therefore, God himself created evil and sickness and death, and again, it means Jesus' death served no purpose.

If Adam & Eve (to return things to Stephen Fry's comments) were not real, then Fry is completely right. God is evil. God is the direct cause of everything bad. God is the direct cause of children getting bone cancer etc. And again (repeating it because it's important), it means that Jesus' death served no purpose. That's a pretty big hole in Christianity imo.

Obviously, people are free to believe whatever parts of the religion they wish, but I think it's important to consider the knock-on effects of discounting parts of it.

Even if they were real, as I've explained before, the way the story is told reveals it to be a complete setup. Thinking entities with no knowledge of right and wrong/good and evil, forbidden object placed right in the middle with easy access and nothing actually physically preventing access to it, and a supposedly all seeing and all-knowing entity wagging his finger, saying don't touch it and then supposedly walking away and leaving the entities who are essentially toddlers mentally thinking they're unsupervised.
How is that NOT a setup? It then means that God "sacrifices" himself to himself to fix a thing he deliberately set into motion...and all for what?

mikom wrote: »

Magnets, I think
But it's not an exact seance.

Closest I could find with a quick search

antiskeptic wrote: »

What standard of good and evil do you propose to measure God against?

I've posted this particular quote from Terry Pratchett before, but it is the perfect rebuttal of your nonsense:

I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

If your god actually existed (thankfully he doesn't, he was simply the product of a deranged megolomanical group of people), he would have in a just society have to stand trial for the crimes against humanity he has comitted over the years of our species existence. And if it happened there would be no possible way that he would not be convicted of crimes so heinous it would make the Nazis hung at Nurnburg look like a bunch of girl scouts who put a bit extra on the cookies they were selling.

So how dare you, how dare you, have the sheer audacious temerity to come on here and lecture the rest of us about how we should live our lives and where we get our morality from? You have the gall to worship the ultimate evil, the most immoral creature ever created by humanity, and then deride us and call us lesser beings simply because we have seen through the lies and evils of the cabal of megolomaniacs who control your religion. There is no other group of religions apart from the Abrahamic ones which have the bare faced evil to tell us that the evil in this world, the pain it spins on is created by a loving, perfectly good, creator and that to deny his existence (despite all the evidence telling us that he's a badly written fiction) is the worst evil imaginable and that all the evil acts attributable to him are actually for our good. We have grown up, we have become wise, we no longer have time for such nonsense.

Matteroffact wrote: »

God doesn't step in and alleviate the discomforts of this life. Cancer and any other misfortunes are all part and parcel of this valley of tears. The cancers of this world have come about because of the way we live and how we treat this planet. The chips fall where they may and the fact that some people suffer more than others is not down to God. We are all here with free Will and how we use it is up to us. If God were to step in then we wouldn't have our free Will anymore. Also, the people who suffer in this life are probably closer to God than the people who don't. As far as God's concerned we are here to get into Heaven when we die so anything that brings us closer to this aim is really a good thing. We are not here to have a ball. This would be how I see it.

The promise of jam tomorrow. Millions have starved in the past who were gullible enough to believe it, and it seems there are still millions willing to starve today.

Edit: And how do you reconcile the two incompatibilities in your theology that you mentioned, a) our free will, and b) your imaginary friend's omnipotence. If he has the power to do anything then we don't have free will, because he can force us to do what he wants.