To be frank, the Abrahamic god doesn't hypothetically stop evil because the Abrahamic god *is* evil, as a concept:
A god creates a race of beings with no knowledge of good and evil.
Said god allows them to be tempted to eat from a tree that will *give* them knowledge of good and evil.
Same god...
This is just trying to cram world events to fit a narrative and completely ignores the multitude of other times in world history that the "nations were wrathful".
Europe essentially spent 1,000 years locked in a never-ending cycle of war alternately with themselves, the middle east and Asia...
I feel rather the reverse.
I was a Christian all through my life until my mid-20s, when I came to realize how foolish the entire belief structure was.
I feel pity for *theists*, especially those who have committed their lives to it as pastors, missionaries or other church-based workers...
Once again Christians come into a thread and treat Atheism as a religion because they can't think outside the context of a religion. They can't grasp the absence of religious thought.
There is biblical support for slavery.
There is no Atheism "holy book" or set of written rules. It is simply...
You aren't making any sense with this statement.
"there can be no middle ground between truth and falsehood" is a true statement. Something is either true or it is not true. *You* apparently don't know what an agnostic is. An agnostic professes to not *know* if a God is true or not, which...
Attempting to convince someone pushing a theological agenda to set that agenda aside and examine actual evidence has always struck me as a fool's errand but good on you for trying, Augustus.
As for the topic, I'm going with the guy that invented A/C.
This directly contradicts what is in the story. The fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is exactly what allowed them to know right from wrong in the first place. They didn't know what they had done until they had done it.
This is actually one of the big flaws in the bible, to be honest. Which is weird because it would have been easy to fix via another draft.
Yes, God gives Adam and Eve a command, but at this point Adam and Eve are as children. Infants, really. They have no knowledge of good and evil. None...
JWs paid taxes during WW2. Where do you think their taxes went?
They supported the war effort whether they knew it or not simply by paying income and sales taxes (not every state had sales tax at that point, but the vast majority did), and even money paid to companies that did any work at all...
Oh I can't WAIT for this. I'm going to predict that your citations will all be from christian or conservative sources that don't have actual studies to back them up.
The current research IS quite clear, it just doesn't say what you want it to say. And I am *very* sure on that, thanks.
This is nonsense. "Please read my holy book and only think about my holy book the way I think about it so you don't accidentally figure out it is all basically nonsense".
Anyway, to the original topic:
This is one of those things that make it so obvious that the god of the Old Testament and...
No. Mostly because *we* exist, thus we know complex, intelligent life is at least possible.
Given the size of the universe (which we basically can't grasp), other life existing *somewhere* is at least probable (though obviously not guaranteed).
Now, the chances we will ever *encounter* that...
Not to mention the entire idea of needing a sacrifice in the first place is so bronze age its hard to even fathom.
An omnipotent god can make all the rules, and this god chose to decide that the only way humanity could be "saved" was if he created a son and killed him.
That's...quite frankly...
The problem here is that, biblically, god did this *all the time*.
As an example, I'll pull from the story of Genesis:
- God creates man and woman ignorant of the difference between good and evil. They have a "child-like" understanding of the world around them, and do not know right from...
I think it is more accurate to say that "Certain people are nasty".
Our personalities are formed by a combination of experiences, genetics and other biological factors. A nasty person was very likely always going to BE a nasty person (generally speaking). Now, was that person's personality...