Uhm, last i checked the specific god you're talking about killed more people ( thus not giving them chance to, as you put it "learn and grow" ) than Satan himself.
check and mate to that argument.
One of the strongest evidences for God I have found is that matter exists, if the laws of the universe where even slightly different, by the tiniest amount, protons or neutrons would not form, matter would not exist and the universe would just be clusters of quarks and such floating around, what else other than a God could have fine tuned such a perfect balance so as to allow the Universe to form.
If your 5 year old child had a gun and started shooting people, you wouldn't stop him? You would let him grow because he is a good person?
I would like to see you come up with a rational watertight argument for a God
, it is a fairly common argument with more merit than most, how would your immune system develop through evolution, it is not like growing a wing for example where more survive as wing like things let something glide, the immune system is hugely complex and it is very difficult to see the steps in how it came about (although I am sure we will eventually).
If you read a few posts up, you can see I am defiantly not really in support of that.
You can have empirical evidence, or a priori evidence in the form of reason. Why can you not use those?
The burden of proof is on the person postulating the claim.
In order to refute a statement one must have an equal amount, or superior evidence against the statement, since there is no evidence in favour of the existence of God, saying God simply doesn't exist trumps because a positive claim requires evidence. In addition, there is evidence of absence of Gods existence, and logical proof that shows certain conceptions of God to be illogical, thus he cannot possible exist.
Faith is not an acceptable criteria for gaining knowledge. If you said you had faith that elvis presley was still alive, people would not take you seriously.
This thread has been arguing ad infinitum for the past 10 pages. All I've seen is conjecture, jargon thrown around, the rape of circular reasoning, and desperate attempts to cite for intellectual leverage.
I don't know where everyone learned to conduct an argument, but you want to keep your opinion accessible, free of jargon and fallacious elements as much as possible.
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It’s undeniable that as time has moved forward, that the majority of theists have transitioned from hardline fundamental beliefs (Jesus literally walked on water) to modern reductionism (walking on water is a metaphor). The similarities in the long list modern faiths are much greater in number than the differences. Most advocate the same policies (peace, family values, etc) and only differ in their worshiped deities. Based on the geographic roots of the major religious strongholds; the Ottoman Empire held formidable population of the followers of the Islamic faith, while Europe were the most adamant proprietors of Christianity. That is why Islamic people gather Mosques and Christians gather Churches. The natural inferable reason for this is because the congregations of both prefer mingling with people of the same cultural identity.
Making someone feel comfortable is the only reason why religion has lasted so long. Prior to the accessibility of the internet, as people grew up and found employment, they became disconnected and were locked into routines. Socialization at work was often stale and would more or less devolve into talking about work (ie. Sally in accounting got laid off) or other uninteresting topics. This isn’t to say that work relationships turned out this way, but figuring out what your coworker’s interests were with trivial to no knowledge about them is very difficult. In short, work relationships were boring and made people feel uncomfortable.
Faith provides a remedy to those who decided to join. Meeting every Sunday at a Church provided the opportunity for people to socialize with others with a common interest that was not as stale and cutthroat (work relationships). This people environment was very welcoming and hosted lots of fun events like banquets which bolstered its popularity throughout the past few centuries. While these communities were very welcoming, they would likely judge the fuck out of you. Even if someone did not completely believe in the Bible or the Quran, or whatever scripture a religion takes from, they wanted to remain on positive relations with this community. And so, because of this people would either pretend or strengthen their beliefs in order to affirm their level of acceptance (peer pressure theme of social politics). This lead to many cases of mass faith conversions of families in order to build favor with the religious institution they belonged to.
Fundamentally, religions are the cumulative existence of hundreds of thousands of social clubs. These social clubs sold themselves on the “fun†principle of their environment which lead to many generations growing up confused with their faith, and with the advent of the internet, these same people (but not limited to) were given an treasure trove of misinterpreted knowledge and avenues of pretentious jargon filled rants which converted them into the emotionally driven keyboard warriors which commonly refer to themselves as atheists (many of which have posted their biased opinions on this thread while bashing the validity of faith institutions).
Informal arguments on religious integrities always draw from a small pool of conclusions.
 Science will prove it doesn’t exist some day
 Science has already proven some aspects of religion wrong
 The potential use of every fallacy ever created
 Some quantum mechanics bullshit or it's "just too complex to create"
I don’t know what called for a reposting of this topic if op already knew the never ending cycle would renew. Arguing religion is class one in one of the most fruitless topics you can argue. There's so much gray area and unexplored territory that all you can do is continue to pull conjecture from thin air. What good does it do to question the integrity of religion to begin with? All you end up accomplishing is creating subcultures and putting barriers in between them. If something brings someone else comfort, what right does an outside party have to judge?
Present views that you, yourself, quantified before you "chime-in" or bash on the theists who weren't prepared for overly complex jargon (which serves no practical purpose in debate), cynicism, and ego boosting. The purpose of discussion is to further your horizons of a topic, not stomp someone drawing from a smaller knowledge pool than you into the ground.
