Yup you did open a can-o-worms lep, I really dont know what to say, you present a strong argument, but just as some constructive criticism, do mention the ups of christianity adn then argue why they are wrong. Basically what this all boils down to is people's views on Human kind.

I dont believe in god personaly, but at the same time im a hypocrite, i find myself praying to some ultimate figure for cumfort, but thats the reason why i believe that Humans created God out of fear and ignorance for pure cumfort, some friend that you can talk too when times get hard.

And just as you said, the idea of an afterlife is very appealing to me. But once again I believe that the human mind is very primitive, and thats why the human mind is very unstable, hence the prophets, where they men of god, or were they really just crazy people like there are today? the truth of the matter is we will never know, unless we travel back in time.

So in short, I can stand behind you argument lep (im not sucking up) what you said is what Ive been contemplating for years, but never really had the guts too express it. Just the only difference between us is I dont think religion in general is "wrong" its a person's preference, and if they find cumfort in the religion then thats them, It prevents them from going crazy. (I was going to say something else but it might raise up too much muck) but all in all, good argument.
-omega

Yes. I think any way of thinking that can help you do good is a positive one, no matter 'flawed' it may be to the 'enlightened' mind. There are different ones to choose for different people.

I chose to be rude to Lep because he chose to be rude to a very wide range of people, many of them very dear to me. Obviously, with an issue such as this, it does nobody any good to push and see who can win a stubbornness contest (see: penis fencing, c**k jousting, dick-duelling contest), so I apologize.

You want feedback? Ok, well here it is. Please, do not take my criticisms personally if you can avoid it. I tried to stick to the issues.

I find your arguments generally unconvincing and irrelevant to the issue. Lets go point-by-point. Your origional text is default colored and italicised. My comments are green. edit: It appears that some of the formatting got buggered, but I hope who is saying what is obvious from context.

Christians often look at the good points to their religion, so here are the bad ones, just so you can see both sides to the argument!

Moot points/questions about god:

These are labelled ?moot? as God is an idea which we cannot question, through design rather than <wheres the rest of this sentence>

First, people question God all the time. You yourself have questioned God as you are an atheist. Second, why does that supposed inability to question God make these following points moot? In addition, you are trying to make these following points as part of your argument, so why do you want to make them moot?

An aside, I hate the word moot since the original and true definition is nearly the exact opposite of its commonly used definition. By origional definition the term moot means ?open for debate?, but by common usage it means ?irrelevant?.

• You surely cannot believe in the concept of hell as a place of infinite punishment if you believe in a god of infinite love

A lot of Christians these days don?t actually believe in hell as a literal place, or if they do they think of it in the following way: the act of sinning separates you from god, and being far from god is the ultimate suffering, so essentially people who sin are causing their own suffering and God doesn?t intervene because of free will.

Further, who ever said God was all about love only?

• How can you have free will if god is ?all knowing? and knows what you?re going to do anyway?

This is the same basic argument as saying, ?How can you believe in free will if everything is governed by the laws of science?. The same counter arguments apply.

• Why should you ?live for god? if he?s infinite?

To achieve happiness and enlightenment, perhaps? To have a purpose in life? That?s the neat thing about believing in a God ? you automatically get a purpose in life for free. What do you live for? The betterment of the human race? Having a good time? Making ends meet with no in particular purpose at all? Why is what you live for any better than living for a god? What does being ?infinite? have to do with anything?

• Why does god not reveal himself ?directly to us?, like he supposedly used to do?

Why should he? Do you mean to imply that God should come by and pull out a bag of tricks every few years or so? Who are you to tell God what to do? You imply that since you can?t predict God?s actions that he is false. Further, a large number of people would claim that God has ?revealed himself? to them personally through various means. You would call them hallucinations or lies, but then again you have the same response to the biblical stories, so you have failed to make a contradiction.

• Men and women were not created equally; he is a he and our father, and women were created from a man.

You have two basic arguments in this sentence. First, you argue that since God is traditionally characterized as a male, the Bible is biased against women. Second, you argue that the biblical difference in how man and woman were literally created contradicts the notion that all people are created equal.

As has been pointed out, the English language lacks a good neutral gender pronoun. Do you really think that Christians believe that god has male genitalia? Or, if he encompasses everything, that he somehow doesn?t also encompass womanness? Even God is somehow ?male? (what is the definition of being male vs. female in these sorts of situations, anyways?), why does that discriminate against women?

Your interpretation of the declaration of independence is flawed. In a literal sense, people are not created equally. We are not all exact clones of one another, and that?s a Good Thing. I believe, as do most people including the courts, that the spirit behind the phrase ?All men [and women] are created equal? is not that people are literally created equally, but that no person is inherently superior or inferior to another person, and that discrimination against people based on gender, race, class, etc is wrong.

Your argument here requires a literal take on the phrase. If women were indeed created from man as it says in the bible, would that make them inferior? Hell no. The circumstances of how someone was created has nothing to do with anything. Heck, women give birth to all babies, so one could argue that men are basically created from women. Trying to apply moral standards to literal things like this is silly.

• Why do you need the bible and other people to convince you of his existence; surely his existence alone should be enough

This is a very good point. You could base your entire argument off this. However, I would bet that your friends think that they are ?feeling God?s existence? and that?s a major reason they are converting. Whether their feelings are truly from God or are just psychological thingamajigs is open for debate.

• It is surely his fault that we sin

You offer no logical support for this statement. Further, if you believe in free will, then if you sin it is your own fault, not God?s. Sounds like you are trying to pass blame to God that belongs on mankind. If you don?t believe in free will, then everything is God?s fault at some level or another. In that case, it is not a far stretch to think of God as some sort of amorphous force of the universe that is all-good even though ?bad? things happen. Sort of like how you could argue that the forces of nature are good and beautiful even though animals kill each other, etc.

To me, he appears malevolent (towards mankind in general), psychotic (various OT stories- e.g. the Flood) and insecure (for requiring us to live for him and testing people?s faith).

First, why do you think that you can psychoanalyse God in terms of human psychology? Second, if you believe the Bible, it would seem that God has done more good for mankind than bad. Why do you think that the moral standards of humans apply to God? Third, a lot of Christians do not think of the stories literally.

Moot points/questions about Christ:

The anti-god ideas above are against the idea of his existence; Jesus supposedly being a real person is much harder to question about. There are simple ?Tavern questions? that, conveniently, can?t really be answered, such as why is more of his life not documented in the bible. His purpose was to be a way for us to be forgiven by god, which we cannot really ask ?why? about. The best we can do is to question his very existence, but apart from the bible itself all we have a few shreds

That you not question the will of God is a postulate of Christianity, much like that it is wrong to kill a person is (I hope) a postulate of your moral code. Postulates are those unprovable yet intuitive ideas that a person?s internal logic is based on. You can?t make a logical argument for or against it. For example, a serial killer could say that nothing is wrong with killing people, and there is no logical way to argue that he is morally wrong since his basic postulates differ from yours. Certainly you could bring up the fact that from an objective standpoint if everyone killed anyone at will, society would not function, but you could not prove that it is morally wrong.

As an atheist I am prepared to accept that he may have been a real person. But if Jesus did do the things he?s said to have done- cure a Leper, turn water into wine, and perform various other miracles- does that automatically make him into something supernatural? What would you think if David Blaine started to do these things and said he was Jesus? Fulfilling a prophecy of the appearance of a messiah isn?t enough either, especially when only two of the gospels detail his birth, and disagree on the details (seeing as neither writer was there). Dying on the cross and coming back to life, then? There seem to be a lot of conveniences at this part of the story- having nails through your palms instead of wrists, not having your legs broken, a conveniently donated tomb complete with inescapable boulder, and guarding soldiers being scared off by angels and never being heard from again.

Here you bring up an excellent point ? just because Jesus did certain things does not necessairily make him the son of God. For the sake of example, lets pretend that there was IRREFUTABLE evidence that Jesus walked on water and cured lepers and rose from the dead. EVEN THEN you could argue that it doesn?t make him the son of God. He could be an alien with special abilities. His actions could be a series of ridiculously improbably quantum events. We could all be in the matrix. This inherent unprovability of physical phemenon is why it all comes down to faith rather than science.

Why I am not Christian:

I see human behaviour in this world that:

? Means there cannot be a Christian god watching over us and lets human free will override people?s ?right? to find god, or their ?right to life?. The only thing there can be, in my opinion, is free will, and its consequences.

So basically you are saying that if God were good he would not allow free will since humans have used free will for bad things. By this logic you would favor a totalitarian regime in which everyone does what the government wants and no on gets killed, there is no hunger, etc, but there is no free will.

? Explains a lot of points about Christianity; such as why it might have come about, why people supposedly died for it, and why it has persisted for so long (see later)

You see a lot of behavior. That?s hardly what I?d call conclusive evidence?

People have used religion, including Christianity, for personal gain. Control of people- how they live, what they think- and wars, killing perhaps millions of people (and far more over religion in general), have resulted from it. Admittedly you?re unlikely to use it for the same aims, but the people who did these things were the ones who controlled the stories and compiled the bible.

Sometimes the church was controlled by bad people, and sometimes bad actions were done in the name of Christianity, yes. So what? Islamic fundamentalists use radical interpretations of their holy texts to justify 9/11, but that doesn?t mean that Islam is evil. Bad people can make up interpretations of anything to justify their actions.

I am exerting my free will to be atheist, yet above any other sin I will be punished for that. Christianity tells us that we will be rewarded or punished for what we believe, rather than what we do.

Not all Christians agree with that. Also, why are your actions inherently more important than your beliefs? Your actions are a combination of your beliefs the culture that you were brought up in, and the situation you are currently in. If a German during WWII was drafted into the nazi army with out a choice even though he believed nazism to be wrong (very common situation), should he have been punished for his actions (fighting on the evil side)?

There are inconsistencies in the Bible, through either translation mistakes (e.g. ?I am the word? in Genesis, or the name Barabbas), intentional fudging (the letters of the early Church), the OT-NT change in God?s attitude. The Bible you read today was compiled by the Catholic Church from various stories, who even many of my Christian friends don?t trust?

Oh no, there are mistranslations. So what? This is one reason why most Christians interpret the Bible symbolically/in a general sense rather than literally.

To me it is a standard set of morals, which exist in most non-Christian cultures anyway and would lead to social breakdown if they weren?t there, with the promise of an ?eternal afterlife? and a warm fuzzy feeling that someone is taking care of you tacked on top, and the fear of going to hell if you don?t believe it.

It?s true, Christian morals are shared across many cultures. The afterlife is a big part of Christianity. God?s care is a big part of Christianity. Congratulations, you have identified several main characteristics of Christianity. So what? You are not actually making a point here. You are trying to imply things about these parts of Christianity through your word choice while describing it rather than through well structured arguments.

Like someone once said, ?Punishing people for not believing in Christianity is like putting some guy in a room with 30 boxes in which one box doesn't have a bomb in it, and it's his fault if he opens the wrong box.? Sadly, from an atheist?s point of view this analogy fails, as he?d be safest not opening any boxes!

No. The analogy would be that he?s got to open a box or he will get shot, and 29 of the boxes have bombs.

Again, it?s just a difference of postulates. If you believe in Christianity, then what you just said is no contradiction.

The reasons you have presented are hardly conclusive for why someone shouldn?t believe in Christianity.

Why are people Christian?

A lot of people are born into it and are brought up believing it, and do not get the chance to discuss and think about it properly. But why should some people convert?

• They feel that there must be a god or supreme creator. All cultures have religions; it is a ?God shaped hole?. Psychologists would argue this is meant to replace ?I don?t know? when asking about the Universe, plus some cultures have multiple gods.

So basically you are saying that humans have an innate intuition that a God exists. Isn?t this contrary to your argument?

• They want to believe in an afterlife. It is appealing, even to me, to want to be able to convince myself that death is not the end, and to not be so scared about it.

Yeah, it certainly is VERY appealing. So what? Just because something is appealing doesn?t mean that it isn?t true.

• It?s a ?win-win? situation. No it?s not; other religions will similarly have you being punished for believing in another god. Unless their gods are nice enough not to create a hell.

This is bull. If someone cites this as their reason for being Christian, then they aren?t really a Christian at all; they are just going through the motions and have no real faith.

• Because their friends are Christian. You will talk about it and generally live it, and quite possibly be won over. It?s being born into a country that is predominantly one religion- Christianity in the bible belt of America, Islam in the Middle East- but on a larger scale. There is a feeling of ?togetherness? you get from Church and sharing the beliefs

Ok, fair enough. The feeling of togetherness may unfairly influence people?s opinions. However, Christians would argue that this good communal feeling comes from the fact that Christianity is the true religion, not the other way around.

• Because people died for Christianity. People will often die for what they believe in- it?s not a new concept- and believing that strongly in something doesn?t make it right. See cult suicides, or do an internet search for the word ?martyr?. No-one ever said these people were perfectly sane either, and you?re assuming the letters of the early Christian Church are all original and haven?t been altered or mistranslated.

Do people really join Christianity for this reason alone? I think seeing or hearing about a martyr can spark the change, but there has to be something there already.

• Because Christianity seems more correct than other religions. It?s going to if people are trying to convert you! Most of the core beliefs stem from people being ?told? things by God through visions, which is nowadays known as ?being something wrong with your brain?. And go talk to a cleric or mullah if you?re curious about Islam. If you talk to someone clever, yes they will make it seem like it all fits- but what do you expect for someone who has dedicated their purpose to being to a 2000 year old idea that?s been asked these questions time and time again!

What do you mean by more ?correct?? Who is to say what is a vision and what is a hallucination? What is wrong with having a smart person convince you or their position through well thought out reasoning? What?s wrong with someone devoting their life to what they think is the key to life the universe and everything?

Something to bear in mind- approximately 100 billion people have lived on this earth since 8000BC (check internet sources, and work it out yourself). How many of those people do you think will have heard about Christianity, let alone been Christian? How many people convert to Christianity each other? How many people de-convert, and why the decline in spirituality in the west (mainly Europe) in recent years?

What does the number of people who have lived have to do with anything.

Questions to ask about Christianity:

• A lot of the bible and Christianity draws from Judaism; why are you not Jewish? Why did they not turn to Christianity after his death?

Because they don?t believe that Jesus is the son of God. Simple enough.

• Some people are born more ?gullible? than others and will take up ideas easier than me. Anything short of god appearing ?personally? will not sway me; why should I have ?worse chances? at getting into heaven? If I live a good life (by any standard set of morals) but simply do not accept Christ, why should I burn in hell, instead of someone who does believe but lived a terrible life?

You?ve already made this point several times.

• Why is there evil and sin in the world? If you say that it?s a result of having free will, I will ask you why god, in his infinite power, could not create us with a simple physical or mental inability to sin. After all, I want to fly, but despite free will I have been physically denied; and some people will be born into this world but never hear of Christianity, and despite free will they have been ?mentally? denied the chance to learn about Christ. How is this different from, say, stopping someone from thinking about doing something bad by making them unable to do so? Why does god deny us some things we want with our free will but apparently not others?

No free will = dystopia. Better to have free will and sin than no free will at all.

• Is god?s will more or less important than free will? Surely they are the same thing seeing as he?s supposedly infinite and knows what we will do? In which case what?s the point in living and him ?testing? us?

The fact that you do or do not believe in God would be rather arbitrary if there were no free will. The point is that according to christians humans are given free will, and the choice to follow God?s will.

• Original sin stems from Adam and Eve eating the apple and gaining ?knowledge?; it would seem that sin stems from free will and having knowledge of the world. Why is this wrong? Or is it a hint that questioning Christianity is wrong..?

This is a good point. I bet Christian theologians have argued over this countless times.

• How much of the bible is true and hasn?t been intentionally altered? Do you assume all the stories you base your beliefs on, and letters you base your ?proof? on, are true?

There is no such thing as ?proof? in the real world. Absolute proofs exist only in the mathematical world of logic. Questions of theology are those questions that cannot be proven or disproven in the mathematical/logical realm. However, the idea of placing blind faith in a real document, the Bible, is kind of sketchy, and that is why a lot of Christians think of it metaphorically and don?t take it literally in all places. In any case, trust in God is more important than trust in the Bible in all Christian churches that I know of.

What about my god?

Suppose I told you I worshipped a different god, who did any one of the following:

• Created us without sin but judged us on what we do in life, regardless of our belief in him, and certainly didn?t send anyone to an infinite punishment for a finite sin
• Created man with the urge to be nice and responsible and generous to others, as he has given us the urge to learn about the world, procreate and ?fulfil? ourselves
• Made himself more known to us

Would that make him more infinitely loving and basically ?better? than your god?

More happy-nicey-nice does not mean better. Further, the question of whether the god of one religion is ?better? or ?worse? than the God of another is irrelevant. What, is this a niceness contest where the nicest God wins?

In my opinion then: Christianity is simply wrong. Despite the fact that I have just as much proof for it being fake as anyone might do for its existence, there are very strong arguments against the existence of a Christian god, and plenty of reasons for (the non-crazy) biblical events that don?t call any god into account. Of course you?re free to believe what you want, but as stated at the beginning this was written to help give you the side of the argument you might not hear about so often!

So basically you agree that it all comes down to faith since there is no proof either way. Why, then should arguments over semantic issues like those you have mentioned come into play? Throughout this mini-essay you made no ?very strong? arguments, and made hasty mention of only a couple decent arguments. The rest of what you said is irrelevant and clouds the issue. Further, you consistently bring up arguments that are based on the postulates of being atheist, making your arguments circular (just like many Christians base their arguments on Christian postulates that atheists fundamentally disagree with).