New User - God's Experiment

Debate Room
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I don’t know how much I can write here but I can go from Genesis to Revelation and explain both the problems I have with Christianity and the questions I have. I am a young 77 years old and have been seriously questioning things for only 4 years. Actually, there have been questions there for most of my life, but it has become more serious to me. So, I’ll start by talking about the fact that we are God’s “failed experiment”.

  • I’ll start by saying that it is obvious to me that God’s creation of the earth and mankind is an “experiment”. How else can you explain the fact that He keeps getting caught off guard as you move through the Bible. First, he is caught off guard by Adam and Eve disobeying him and being reduced from immortal to mortal beings while being kicked out of the garden.
  • Then we move up to the time of Noah (and yes, I believe there was a worldwide flood). And now God is sorry He has created man. Specifically, He says “The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled”,
  • So, instead of going ahead and destroying all of mankind (knowing that they will sin again), He saves Noah and his family to replenish the earth. And so, what do we have today? A small percentage of the earth’s population are “born again” Christians and the rest are supposedly headed to Hell (more about that later).
  • So, then He lets thousands of years go by before He decides to send a Savior. So, for thousands of years, millions of people go to Hell because He’s not ready yet to send His Son to save people.
  • Then, during these thousands of years, He sets aside the Israelites to be His people. He gives them a whole bunch of terrible laws to follow and kills them off if they don’t obey. In other words, they have NO free will!
  • The Israelites continually disappoint Him and so he sends Jesus to save them but ultimately only a few are saved, and the rest exist today without a savior. Another failed experiment.
  • As for other cultures, He allows them to set up their own nations so he can have the Israelites go in and kill them all off.
  • And there is much more that I can say about this “experiment” but will leave it at that for now.
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After all that, your ‘god’ is pretty bloody useless, isn’t he?!

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Consider your questions if there is no god. Does that make more sense than a failed experiment?

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Hi @GentlemanTech, welcome to AR.
Questions::
Why are you a theist?
Are you a Christian?
Does your god have the omni- suite of attributes?

A side note: Some conversations can get intense here, but understand that it’s typically ideas / beliefs that are being challenged and is not a personal attack.

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I would suggest that if all of your points seem like stuff that would be written by clannish and confused people who didn’t know the basis of anything, that may be no coincidence.

What evidence have you to demonstrate that this god exists, or is even possible?

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That’s not a fact.

Can you demonstrate any objective evidence that any deity exists, or is even possible? If you can’t, then I don’t care what you claim is “obvious to you”. Anymore than I care what flat earthers claim is “obvious to them”.

This is an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.

You’re wrong, the geological record demonstrates unequivocally, that there has never been a global flood.

When will you be moving from claims…to objective evidence?

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First off, I congratulate you on questioning things regardless of how old or young you are.

Please consider:

  1. If God exists, then where does God come from? If God has always existed, then why not skip a step and assume that the Universe has always existed.

  2. If God’s origin is an unanswerable question, then why not skip a step and assume that the origin of the Universe is an unaswerable question?

  3. If we assume that the Abrahamic God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism exists, then which sect do we follow as the correct one? Catholics, Muslims, and Baptists preach that each has the correct way of worshipping God, while all others are destined for eternal damnation in hell. What happens when we multiply this across thousands of different sects? Atheism is the smart bet under these circumstances.

  4. The vast amounts of social damage (like wars and other violence) done in the name of religion means that we should–as decent human beings–question the validity of all religion.

  5. If we reject God after considering these points, and we’re wrong when we die . . . then I would think that God would give us a pass into the afterlife, as I would imagine that God (if he exists) must be reasonable.

  6. If God is unreasonable, then all of the religious belief in the world doesn’t make a difference and we’re all screwed anyway, so choose to be a good person (in however you honestly define “good” as a concept) to the best of your abilities purely for its own sake.

  7. Theists throw out the old chestnut that “life has no meaning if we are simply random blobs of meat” when there is no God, but I disagree. Meaning is what we give it, and life should be savored, enjoyed, and put to good use while we have it if there is no afterlife . . . so atheism is an affirmation of life rather than the reverse, as we need to make the most of the life we have now. I–for example–choose to be a nurse, and I argue that my life has a very deep meaning when I’m working on my patients regardless of God’s existence.

And so on.

I hope this was helpful to you.

Let me know if you wish to dialog further.

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Yes, I’m a theist. I cannot at this point just give up on God totally. Too many years of believing. What it really comes down to (and I was going to get to this) is that I really don’t think I want to live forever in Heaven (whatever that is) and I am totally convinced that Hell was a made-up word by a fourth century Pope who at the same time created Pergatory! It was all about keeping the faithful faithful to the church and scaring them into doing whatever the church said. I am so angry at God for allowing this!!! The word HELL did not exist in the original manuscripts! I have a great video from YouTube you watch about this.

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I understand that. I have no beef. I just need to talk to someone who understands.

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Well, that sounds like a challenge, and I think I can answer this. The short answer is that there are archeological proofs, and even more significantly, prophetic proofs. Do your own research but archeologists have shown the Bible is true. Prophets have made prophesies that are thousands of years old and became 100% true. Hard to argue with that.

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This is switching the burden of proof.

Everything you’ve mentioned above is hardly evidence, but instead claims about the existence of evidence.

Is this god testable? Quantifiable? Independently verifiable?

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And this is the most difficult task for any theist. I would suggest compiling what you think is evidence as a portfolio that is cohesive and easy to understand before making complex claims on this forum. Trust me I’ve learned my lesson.

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Why not?

Are you saying you’re too lazy to change? Or is it that you don’t have control over it? Or you just figure that if you give up on this belief now then all those years were wasted?

Well I sure don’t blame you there! Existing forever having to worship a megalomaniac wouldn’t be my cup of tea either!

At a god? Or at the people who told you this god exists? Or at yourself for buying in to it?

Pick up a copy of “ Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason” by Seth Andrews. You may find it helpful.

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I guess at it’s a moot point. I have apparently given up on the ultimate goal of Christians and that is to enter eternal heaven after death. Apparently, I am choosing to be annihilated and skip the whole live for eternity thing.

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Sorry to keep picking you up om this, but you mean evidence, not proofs, it’s a significant distinction. I am also curious how you think archaeology can evidence any deity or anything supernatural? It can be used to provide evidence for historical biblical claims perhaps, but beyond that I am extremely dubious.

No they absolutely have not, this is a sweeping and inaccurate claim, and it is yours to research and evidence, since you are the one making it.

Firstly I Don’t believe this is true, please demonstrate something beyond this bare unevidenced claim, and secondly how does predicting the future, objectively evidence any deity or anything supernatural? Other religions claim this as well, you’d have to believe their claims, or none of them.

I shouldn’t worry, there is no objective evidence that humans can survive their own physical deaths in any meaningful way.

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that is grade A bullshit :ox:

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I’m a former evangelical, 68, and also in tech (if that’s the meaning of your handle) but out of the faith for about 30 years at this point.

Like you, niggling lifelong questions became painful cognitive dissonance, and the center was not holding.

Like you, I spent some time casting about for alternatives: different flavor of Christianity, some other religion. In the end, for me, I let go of theism because all forms of it suffer from the same fundamental problem: the failed epistemology of religious faith. Religious faith says, “accept my chosen list of unprovable assertions uncritically”. This is not how legitimate knowledge is obtained.

Rather than being the Dutch boy with all his fingers busy trying to plug the many leaks in the dike, I decided to let it leak and find a different dike with few to no leaks, plus the freedom to say, “I don’t know” and just sit with that where appropriate, rather than have to have an answer for everything.

As others have pointed out, your faith is based on a book full of claims – the Bible – for which there is, and definitionally cannot be, any proof. That is the whole point of religious faith.

One key thing about atheism is that there’s no longer any anger against god, because you can’t be angry at something that doesn’t exist. Anger is just disappointed love, and you can’t love something that doesn’t exist, either.

Life isn’t personal or directed, it just IS. Once you accept this, so much else begins to make sense. The useless “why” questions melt away. “Why me, why them, what did I/they do to deserve this”. I’ve grieved the loss of loved ones for example with and without the religious faith supports, and I’m here to tell you, it’s MUCH less painful without them.

Most things in the universe aren’t (1) alive and (2) sentient. You won the lottery. Enjoy it for what it is rather than for what you wished it to be.

Welcome to the forum, and I’m glad for your engagement here.

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Archeologists have shown some place names mentioned in the Bible actually existed. The same can be said for the Harry Potter novels – they mention London, for example, but that doesn’t make them either factual or historical.

Archeologists have also shown some events and place mentioned in the Bible definitely did not exist. For example, Moses and the Egyptian captivity and the Exodus are just fan fiction from the Babylonian exile period. There is no evidence for them at all, and much against them.

The alleged Messianic prophecies, for example, are something Jews would laugh at if they didn’t find them so insulting and culturally appropriative. Still, they often DO laugh at them. It is all retconning. Read something involving credible scholarship rather than all the endless circle-jerk of dispensational theologians on this topic. It’s an eye-opener.

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Ponder whether you’re choosing to do this or if you’re actually accepting that their heaven is only a fictional place used to control people (and often fleece them :face_with_raised_eyebrow:).

Without doubt, you’re mortal. Do you want to spend the time you have focused on notion that for which there is no testable, verifiable, repeatable evidence? Or do you want to spend it focused on living?

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I don’t recall scripture giving you that option, but fortunately that is most likely what the actual endpoint is, so no problemo!

I prefer the term “oblivion” rather than “annihilation” as the latter has a harsher, more punishment-laden feel – to me anyway. It just ends. And that’s actually a good thing once you accept it, because we are story-tellers, and all stories to be satisfying need beginnings, middles AND endings.