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The Folly of Atheism

Left Coast

This Is Water
Staff member
Premium Member
I consider the Messengers of all the major religions to be true Messengers, but no I do not believe anyone who claims to be a Messenger/Prophet, not unless they meet certain criteria:

“What then is the mission of the divine prophets? Their mission is the education and advancement of the world of humanity. They are the real teachers and educators, the universal instructors of mankind. If we wish to discover whether any one of these great souls or messengers was in reality a prophet of God we must investigate the facts surrounding His life and history; and the first point of our investigation will be the education He bestowed upon mankind. If He has been an educator, if He has really trained a nation or people, causing it to rise from the lowest depths of ignorance to the highest station of knowledge, then we are sure that He was a prophet. This is a plain and clear method of procedure, proof that is irrefutable. We do not need to seek after other proofs.” Bahá’í World Faith, p. 273

Yes, of course, you have criteria. As does everyone else who believes in "messengers," including the ones you don't accept.

It is not God’s problem at all, because God does not have any problems. It is a problem for those people who expect God to show up, since God is not going to show up.

It's his problem if he wants to claim to be just while punishing people who don't believe in him when he hides from them.

All I was saying is that most people believe in God because of a Messenger/Prophet/Holy man, etc. so that is sufficient for most people. For some rather odd reason, atheists and agnostics cannot understand that God communicates via divine men who I call Messengers because that is the BEST way to communicate, obviously, because it has worked to garner belief in God for most people in the world.

If you actually believe that the best way to communicate with people, or convince them you even exist and aren't just words on a page, is to send intermediaries to talk on your behalf, then I have no clue why you're talking to me right now. You should have an intermediary talk to me and tell me what you think about things, since that's obviously so much more effective.

Please do not waste your time using that argument on me, as you are grasping at straws.

I wasn't using an argument, I was pointing out how silly it would be for you to use a numbers-based argument. It appears you agree that's silly, so we're square.

Do you know anything about psychology?

Actually I do, I have a degree in it and went to grad school to study it for a couple years. But go ahead, dazzle me with your psychological expertise.

Most people who have a religion are attached to their religions and they are convinced they are true, so why would they be willing to give them up and get on the same page as everyone else?

Yeah, just like you. Exactly my point.

Logically speaking, if there is a God, all those religions cannot be true as they are presently believed and practiced, because they contradict each other. So if someone were to try to figure out which religion is true they would have to first try to understand why these religions contradict each other, if all of them came from the same God. The reason is rather simple; the believers in these religions have strayed far from what the Messenger/prophets of these religions originally revealed, so they believe in all sorts of different things. Just look at all the different beliefs within Christianity alone, and the same applies to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Logically speaking, all God needs to do to clarify all this misrepresentation and confusion, right here right now, is show up and explain himself. But your religion has invented an arbitrary reason why he can't do that, and thus we must deal with middle men. Again, God's problem.

Whereas that might be true, Baha’is believe that God has always sent Messengers, even before the Adamic Cycle of religion which began 6,000 years ago. There is no record of such Messengers or religions because the art of writing had not been developed, so our belief is based upon what Baha’u’llah wrote.

Fascinating. I'm gonna need more than Baha'u'llah's say so, though, if you want me to buy that. Call me crazy. :shrug:

Whereas that is true, their parents believed because of some Messenger/Prophet or their culture/country enforced said religion that was established by some Messenger/Prophet.

Yes, religions have founders. That's a completely mundane, obvious observation that doesn't actually explain the mechanism by which people adopt the faith they do. To say that Christianity is the largest religion in the world "because Jesus founded it" is one-dimensional and silly.

That is a straw man. I did not say that YOU can choose to believe in God. I said “man has free will so man can choose to believe in God or not.”
"Man" is composed of individual men. If individuals can't choose what they believe, then "Man" can't as a generalization, either.

You have chosen NOT to believe in God.

Bull. ****. I have not. I haven't chosen not to believe in God anymore than I've chosen not to believe in bigfoot. How many more analogies would you like?

I do not think that we are completely free to choose our beliefs because free will has many constraints such as childhood upbringing, education, and adult experiences, which will determine the choices that we are ABLE to make, However, I think that there is some element of choice. For example, by completely rejecting the idea of Messengers you have pretty much made it impossible to believe in God, since that is how God communicates.

I didn't choose to reject the idea of messengers. It occurred to me at a point in time that using messengers is a silly, inefficient way for an omnipotent being to communicate, and is exactly the kind of mechanism theists in a godless universe would claim is necessary to receive the message of their omnipotent God. I can't unthink that line of reasoning. I am compelled to believe it is so, until I am shown evidence or argument that convinces me I've been wrong.

I understand that atheists are not completely free to believe in God and conversely, some of us believers are not free to not believe in God. Believe me, I have tried to NOT believe in God, but I cannot do it.

Then I don't know what you're arguing about. :shrug:
 

Deeje

Avid Bible Student
Premium Member
Maybe you should just explain exactly what happens to you after you die and for the rest of eternity so I know what it is I'm supposed to believe in...? And Trailblazer too...?

That is the point....nothing happens after you die. You 'sleep' (are in an unconscious state) in a state of virtual 'suspended animation' until God has cleansed the earth of all who pollute it, and wantonly destroy life (human and otherwise). He will then transform this beautiful planet into that which resembles his original purpose for it. Paradise conditions......forever.

Whether we are awakened or not depends on what we did in this life. There is an 'unforgivable sin'...but the majority of humans have not committed it. These I believe will be "the righteous and the unrighteous" who Jesus will call out of their graves to a restoration of life, with their families reunited. (John 5:28-29) God knows whom to resurrect and whom to leave in eternal death. We can build up a record with God now if we want to, guaranteeing a wonderful future.

Eternity will then be spent as God intended it to be spent...in useful work as caretakers and zookeepers and landscapers and gardeners, sharing the work with others who also enjoy maintaining the beauty of it.....and with enhanced mental and physical capacity, there will be endless discovery caring for the earth and its myriad inhabitants....learning more about them and their natural habitats which will be preserved for them, rather than being destroyed to make way for selfish humans.

If we choose God....this is what is promised......choose to believe in nothing, means that nothing is what you get in return. That is what we see as the choices.
 
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Salvador

RF's Swedenborgian
Why limit it to a single god?

Me being just 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003 percent the size of the observable universe does mean there is plenty of space around me for there being possibly more than one god.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
If a sentient being didn't create the universe, Chance did.

Almost as far-fetched as your neighbour having done so.
You're not addressing the substantial questions.

If God is real then God has objective existence and thus exists in nature and not merely as a concept, a thing imagined. Therefore if God is real, God has a real description unique to God, just as H. sapiens sapiens, the arctic loon, Fingerite, Santalum album, any other real thing does ─ a description consisting of real qualities that suffice to distinguish each of them from anything else. What real qualities of God distinguish God from anything else?

Thus, what real qualities will my neighbor have if she's God, the same real qualities she'll lack if she isn't?

And what real qualities will a universe-making superscientist lack that a universe-making real God will have?
 

Bob the Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
God does not make mistakes because God is Infallible.
Humans think that God makes mistakes because humans are fallible.
This is logic 101 stuff.

Yet.... your god is immoral for using Special Favorites. What's that about?

And in it's "infallibility" it is too inept to show itself to everyone, equally. Ooops!

Even worse, Jim! Most of the planet never even heard of this god of yours.....
 

Bob the Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
The problem is that most people do not consider the evidence to be evidence..

You don't get to re-define terms mid-sentence, just because you don't have actual evidence.

But what most people believe about the evidence does not prove anything.

Argumentum ad populum

In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so." Argumentum ad populum - Wikipedia

The converse of this is that if many or most people do not believe it, it cannot be so, and that is fallacious. For example, there was a time in history when most people did not believe the earth was round, but most people were wrong, as we found out later.

You are not helping your cause, here-- you're making it much-much worse:

YOU claimed you had "evidence"... and now? You're saying you don't have any?
 

Bob the Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
I do not have to prove anything to anyone...
People need to prove it to themselves if they want to know.

That's not how it works, actually. Maliciously Evil god work that way, though.

As do grossly incompetent gods.

And, of course, gods that don't actually exist in the first place....
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
As an agnostic, my belief, as it were, is simply; I'm not sure. So I'm not saying anything is or is not.
Okay, thanks for clarifying that. I am sorry I missed that you are an agnostic, I post to so many people here and some also on my forum.
So what do you imagine his excuse is for getting it wrong when he created man and made Saul the king of Israel? Actions he repented, regretted, or was sorry for.
I do not know the Bible very well because I was never a Christian so I am not familiar with that. But as a Baha'i, I do not believe that the Bible is all literally true, as if it happened in real life. The Bible says God did this and God did that, I just don't believe that is necessarily true.
You mean that Genesis 6:6 and 1 Samuel 15:35 are inaccurate? Gotta ask how you know. How you know better than the scholars who translated them into English do. Moreover are you saying the Bible isn't ageless? That with age, passages like those in Genesis and 1 Samuel somehow become inaccurate; that they no longer mean what they once did? .
I don't know, and that is the point. But just because I don't know does not mean I just believe. Unless they are Christians, do scholars believe that everything that is in the Bible actually happened?

Obviously, if passages like those in Genesis and 1 Samuel actually happened then they are history, but how can we know? If you believe them, why aren't you a Jew or a Christian? It seems strange to me that nonbelievers talk about the Bible as if it was true.
 

Guitar's Cry

Disciple of Pan
People - many of them, especially in the 20th century. - have died for their belief in God.

No one ever has or ever will die for their "belief" in the Invisible Dragon.

Doesn't matter for the analogy to work. People have died for aliens lurking behind comets. The proof I have provided for the Invisible Dragon is as valid as your proof for God.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Yes, of course, you have criteria. As does everyone else who believes in "messengers," including the ones you don't accept.
But that does not mean my criteria is wrong or that my Messengers are wrong (or that their criteria is wrong or that their Messengers are wrong.).
It's his problem if he wants to claim to be just while punishing people who don't believe in him when he hides from them.
Again, it is not God’s problem, but God does not have problems, since God is fully self-sufficient and fully self-sustaining, so God has NO need for our belief nor does it matter to God if we think He is unjust.

I never said that God punishes anyone. But God only hides His Essence, His attributes are visible in His Messengers and His will is revealed through Them.
If you actually believe that the best way to communicate with people, or convince them you even exist and aren't just words on a page, is to send intermediaries to talk on your behalf, then I have no clue why you're talking to me right now. You should have an intermediary talk to me and tell me what you think about things, since that's obviously so much more effective.
That is the ONLY WAY God can communicate to humans, because God is not a man so God cannot talk to humans. That is why God sends Intermediaries.

That is why Jesus said: John 14:6 “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I do not have to get an intermediary because I am a human being so I am an intermediary, a messenger for the Messenger so to speak.

Please do not waste your time using that argument on me, as you are grasping at straws.

I wasn't using an argument, I was pointing out how silly it would be for you to use a numbers-based argument. It appears you agree that's silly, so we're square.
Actually I do, I have a degree in it and went to grad school to study it for a couple years. But go ahead, dazzle me with your psychological expertise.
I do not pretend to have psychological expertise, and even though I have an MA in Counseling Psychology, I did not work in the field for various personal reasons, not the least of which is that I had an MA degree in another field and a stable career working in that field. But nevertheless I am very interested in psychology, more so than in religion.
Yeah, just like you. Exactly my point.
I have no reason to give up my religion, since it is hot off the press, not thousands of years old. It never ceases to amaze me how illogical people are, but that is what happens when people are emotionally attached to their religions, usually ones they were brought up in.
Logically speaking, all God needs to do to clarify all this misrepresentation and confusion, right here right now, is show up and explain himself. But your religion has invented an arbitrary reason why he can't do that, and thus we must deal with middle men. Again, God's problem.
God cannot show up on Earth and talk because God is Spirit. That is some kind of fantasy.

God did exactly that when he sent Baha’u’llah, God explained Himself… Baha’u’llah unsealed the Bible and explained what it means (Daniel 12). Daniel 12:4 says “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” The lack of understanding of the Bible is precisely why there are so many Christians that ran to and fro, which resulted in the many factions of Christianity, and this lack of understanding is also why the church had to hold councils to decide upon the doctrines Christians would follow for the next 2000 years.

The Bible was never intended by God to be fully understood until the time of the end. That is why Daniel 12:9 says “And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.”Then Daniel 12:12 says “Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days” which is when the book would be unsealed.

The 2,300 years came in 1844, the exact year the Bab came to announce the coming of Baha’u’llah, and the book was unsealed.

My religion did not invent the middlemen. They have always existed, even though other religions do not refer to them that way, how do you think those religions were founded?
Fascinating. I'm gonna need more than Baha'u'llah's say so, though, if you want me to buy that. Call me crazy.
I would not call you crazy. I had to do a lot of investigation before I believed that Bahaullah was a Manifestation of God. What you or anyone else should need, according to Baha’u’llah, is to investigate His claim to be a Manifestation of God (Messenger).

“Bahá’u’lláh asked no one to accept His statements and His tokens blindly. On the contrary, He put in the very forefront of His teachings emphatic warnings against blind acceptance of authority, and urged all to open their eyes and ears, and use their own judgement, independently and fearlessly, in order to ascertain the truth. He enjoined the fullest investigation and never concealed Himself, offering, as the supreme proofs of His Prophethood, His words and works and their effects in transforming the lives and characters of men.” Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era, p. 8
Yes, religions have founders. That's a completely mundane, obvious observation that doesn't actually explain the mechanism by which people adopt the faith they do. To say that Christianity is the largest religion in the world "because Jesus founded it" is one-dimensional and silly.
No, I am not saying that is WHY Christianity is large, a process took place that caused the religion to spread. But Christianity has held its ground because there is something about Jesus that attracted Christians to become Christians and still does to this very day. Just look at what Christians say about Jesus on this forum. The same is true for Baha’is and Baha’u’llah and Muslims and Muhammad. I do not know as much about Jews and Moses.
"Man" is composed of individual men. If individuals can't choose what they believe, then "Man" can't as a generalization, either.
All men or women can’t believe in God, for various and sundry reasons, and I tend to think God understands that because Baha’u’llah wrote that we all have different capacities and are only responsible for using those capacities.

“From the exalted source, and out of the essence of His favor and bounty He hath entrusted every created thing with a sign of His knowledge, so that none of His creatures may be deprived of its share in expressing, each according to its capacity and rank, this knowledge. This sign is the mirror of His beauty in the world of creation. The greater the effort exerted for the refinement of this sublime and noble mirror, the more faithfully will it be made to reflect the glory of the names and attributes of God, and reveal the wonders of His signs and knowledge.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 262
Bull. ****. I have not. I haven't chosen not to believe in God anymore than I've chosen not to believe in bigfoot. How many more analogies would you like?
I only meant that in the sense that you do not believe in God. How free you were to make that choice is another matter altogether and only God knows that since God is All-Knowing.
I didn't choose to reject the idea of messengers. It occurred to me at a point in time that using messengers is a silly, inefficient way for an omnipotent being to communicate, and is exactly the kind of mechanism theists in a godless universe would claim is necessary to receive the message of their omnipotent God. I can't unthink that line of reasoning. I am compelled to believe it is so, until I am shown evidence or argument that convinces me I've been wrong.
You and all the other atheists. :rolleyes: I have been posting on forums 24/7 almost exclusively to atheists for over five years, so I have been listening to protestations regarding God using Messengers for five years. I have explained why God uses Messengers in many different ways, yet I have yet to hear one atheist give me a logical argument as to why God should communicate in some other way, how that would work, or why it would work better than Messengers. After all these years the only conclusion I have come to us that atheists do not like the idea of Messengers because they think God should speak to them directly, and many atheists even tell me this. Yet when I explain why God does not speak to everyone directly, and why God does not speak to anyone other than His chosen Messengers, what I say is not acceptable.

So I have hit a brick wall. However, some of these atheists have become my friends and some of them now say they believe God exists, although they still do not like the idea of Messengers. I feel good that at least they believe God exists because that is the most important thing, IMO.
Then I don't know what you're arguing about.
I am not arguing that people can choose to believe in God as easy as falling off a log, even if it seems that way. On the other hand I think people have more power to choose than they give themselves credit for, as I discovered with my former atheist friends who once said they could not choose. Eventually the idea that God most likely exists finally took even though they remain suspicious about Baha’u’llah. But we continue to talk about Him anyway. :)
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Yet.... your god is immoral for using Special Favorites. What's that about?

And in it's "infallibility" it is too inept to show itself to everyone, equally. Ooops!

Even worse, Jim! Most of the planet never even heard of this god of yours.....
It is only considered immoral to you, but that does not make it immoral.
God does not show Himself to anyone.
I am not Jim but if people have not hear about Baha'u'llah that is because the Bahais are not doing a good enough job.
 

ArtieE

Well-Known Member
It is not the same sort of evidence because the book that is evidence for God was inspired by God or written by a Messenger of God, whereas the book that says God does not exists is just written by a human.
Is the Quran evidence for God?
There is no scientific evidence for God and there is no way to test for God, since God is outside the purview of science. Only material things can be tested for. God is not a material thing.
Nonsense. He can just show up at any reputable scientific institution and show them his backparts and they could do any tests they like. Exodus 33:23 Then I will take My hand away, and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen."
 

ArtieE

Well-Known Member
That is the point....nothing happens after you die. You 'sleep' (are in an unconscious state) in a state of virtual 'suspended animation' until God has cleansed the earth of all who pollute it, and wantonly destroy life (human and otherwise). He will then transform this beautiful planet into that which resembles his original purpose for it. Paradise conditions......forever.
How about if you read these books and learn what actually happens after you die? https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Newton/e/B000APC05I?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Eternity will then be spent as God intended it to be spent...in useful work as caretakers and zookeepers and landscapers and gardeners, sharing the work with others who also enjoy maintaining the beauty of it.....and with enhanced mental and physical capacity, there will be endless discovery caring for the earth and its myriad inhabitants....learning more about them and their natural habitats which will be preserved for them, rather than being destroyed to make way for selfish humans.
Seriously!? Spending an eternity playing caretakers and zookepers and landscapers and gardeners on one planet in a universe full of them!? I'd go bonkers with boredom! Would there at least be any chance of expanding out in the universe and explore and colonize all the other planets!?
 
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