Wich bring it back to what i said earlier:

You cant say: No one proved god, therefore maybe there is one.

I'm a strong atheist. I know, with the evidence at hand (or lack of) that there is no god.

For example. Fairies. I know they dont exist. How? No one has prove them to me. If someone would present me evidence of, i would say they exist. But since no one could, i know they dont exist.

What about things like human guilt (or excessive guiltiness) and feeling better when there is a Jesus to forgive you and make you perfect in the next life?

1. People become religious (Christian from my experience) for emotional reasons. Maybe they are religious because they want to be.
2. It must stand to reason that people who are not religious or deny religion also want to be, and are simply using lack of visual evidence as an excuse, as the believers don't need any objective proof that there is a spirit world.

I think in my case conversion happened something like this

1. There are differences between myself and people called Christians
2. Spirits must be real
3. Christian spirits must be real
4. Christian spirits are stronger than I am
5. Slowly.... Christian spirits really care about us....

6. If you can't beat them join them....

No, you are not atheist if you believe in spirits.
Anyone want to back me up on this?

Also forgot to mention that Christian spirits make Christians do stronger things.  Galatians 5:22-23, fruits of the spirit, enhanced patience, love, gentleness, goodness, bla bla bla....

It is easier to call yourself one than it is to be one
It is easy for Jesus to dismiss the false ones in the end

More logic:

• There was a time when no one had provided evidence that evolution was correct. During that time, evolution did not exist.
  
• Before Albert Einstein provided evidence for relativity, it did not exist because no one had proved it to be true.
  
• It was once accepted as proven that the sun revolves around the earth. Did that proof make it so that the earth revolves around the sun?
  

Yes, I know that in each of these cases, it is possible to actually present proof of the validity of the theory. However, there are some things that cannot be proven. For example, some philosophical problems cannot be conclusively decided. Does the outside world exist, or is it a hallucination? Do other people exist? Is the world actually the way we perceive it to be? If you look at Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, it has actually been mathematically proven that there are some true statements in certain mathematical systems that can never be proven to be true within those systems.

Also, your position can be inverted and produce a different result. No one has disproved the existence of God. Furthermore, it is impossible for anyone to ever disprove the existence of God. Therefore, God exists.

What if there is God taking great efforts to remain hidden?

As long as God is hidden you can forget proving creationism scientifically. Or intelligent design or whatever.

God doesn't want to make it easy on us to believe, like with our eyes. We sort of have to want to believe.

Of course you can inverted position, but it's just contrary to science. It's a sophism. Once again, the burden of proof rest on the person making the claim.

I dont see any enhance patience, love, gentleness and certainly not an enhance honesty when it come to christian.

No you are wrong. An atheist can believe in spirit. Atheist only mean do not believe in God. Some Atheist do believe in creationism, spirit, afterlife, reincarnation etc.

But this made me realise a flaw in BB reasonning that i did not see at first reading. You are not agnostic, your atheist.

Also Shrek, BB is not talking about spirit, but spirituality. I have spirituality even though i'm a strong atheist and a skeptic.

But I've never done anything to feel guilty about, I've always lived by the tenet of not hurting others except in self-defence or defence of those I love.  Live and let live, in other words.  

It does seem to me, at least, that religions exist to firstly MAKE you feel guilty, then offering to take that guilt away (absolving you of your sins) for a small payment, be it in donations, or loyalty to the religion, or bringing in more followers (your children, for a start) to make the religion grow more numerous and therefore stronger.

Sort of like a football club membership.

Alison

This post was last modified: 04-04-2011 09:59 AM by Alison.

Bingo!


Eskimo: So you mean if i didn't know about God and sin i wouldn't go to hell?
Missionnary: Exactly
Eskimo: Wich mean i would go to heaven?
Missionary: Yes
Eskimo: Then why the *** haven't you shut your mouth?

I was just thinking about it - there really hasn't been any reason to believe in God since evidence was found that Darwin's theory of evolution was correct. More than a century. That answered the big question of "Where did we come from?" for just about anyone inclined to be scientific. So why do so many educated people still believe in God in the 21st century? Belief in God obviously fills some basic need or it would have fallen by the wayside already. If the huge scienctific discoveries up until this point in time has not been enough to convince people to discard religion, then I doubt that the kind of discoveries that will be made over the next century will have any greater an impact. Especially since much of the science being done these days is so esoteric.

You're assuming that the only reason God would exist would be for humans to explain evolution.

No. I'm assuming that the primary reason that people had for believing in God was to explain:
(1) How did we get here, where did our kind come from?
(2) What is the meaning of life?

What I am saying is that Darwinism provided a perfectly valid scientific explanation for the biggest of the big questions. And yet that did not eradicate religion and belief in God, even among the very well educated.

So there are obviously other reasons for belief in God that go deeper than that. I'm sure that we will never agree on exactly the nature of those reasons. But whatever those reasons are, further scientific advancement may not have a big effect on whether people believe in God or not.

Good riddance to it. I can't see it going without a fight though.