Are people generally good?

[bimmylee]

mirgro said:

bimmylee said:

mirgro said:

bimmylee said:

 

Let's be clear. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." The Bible does teach that Christ is the only way to heaven.

There's a lot of other things in your post that I'd like to respond to, but the bolded part is what I find to be the most interesting. Consider this... If I told you that it takes just as much faith to disbelieve in God as to believe, would you agree?

I won't lie I agree with jsut about everything he mentioned. I have to admit that it does take faith to say there is no god, and stick by it, just a different from of faith, however it takes a lot less faith to say that it's not your kind of god.

Hell, I find the following more plausible than the Bible, and it doesn't take a lot of faith to think that:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Here, I would strongly disagree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it takes an even greater leap of faith to disbelieve than to believe. How?

One example: Fine-tuning of the universe...

The most fundamental characteristics and constants of our cosmos are perfectly calibrated to support organic life. This is sometimes called the Anthropic Principle (the universe seems designed to produce humanity). The odds against those fundamental regularities and constants happening by sheer chance are smaller than one-in-a-trillion.

But atheists are right in pointing out that this fine-tuning argument does not prove that a Creator exists. For example, maybe at the Big Bang an almost infinite number of parallel universes were created at once and we are in the universe that happens to have everything right...

However, consider the illustration of a poker game in which the dealer deals himself twenty straight hands of four aces. The other players are about to pummel the dealer for cheating when the dealer says, "wait, you can't prove I'm cheating; there are a trillion parallel universes and we just happen to be in the one where the chances of dealing twenty straight hands of four aces has been realized." He is strictly right; it is possible that there are trillions of universes and this is the one universe in which all those aces are dealt. But it's a lot more plausible to believe that he is cheating, so the dealer still gets beaten up. No one lives their life the way the dealer suggests. In the same way, the existence of all those fine-tuned constants is strong evidence that God exists.

You do realize that if you take it at a grand sacle of things, any single event has 0 probability of happening, right? However let's play it your way. Do you know what the chances of Christ being born was? Do you realize that the fact that Jesus being born and doing all he did in the exact way he did has a chance of 0? Do you know that Muhammad going into a cave and seeing the Archangel Gabriel also has a probability of 0? I am not saying that a supernatural being didn't fart one day and accidentally created our universe, or tinkered around with it to make it to its liking, what I am saying is that the supernatural being, Jesus, you believe in is bullshit, impossible, imporbable, and just stupid to believe in.

It's not about faith, but about plausability, and I find that story far more plausible than what happened in the Bible. Faith has nothing to do with it.

My argument is specifically about whether or not God exists. Let's stay on-topic here.

Faith has everything to do with it. By not believing in God, a person is taking a leap of faith by assuming (without evidence) that we are all here accidentally. What you are believing is no more probable than what I am believing. (And if probability does not matter to you, then who cares if the life of Jesus was "improbable" or even "impossible"? It still happened.)

Not good enough for you? Let's consider human rights. The ideal of human rights says that each human being is of infinite worth. There are three possible sources for our conviction concerning human rights:

GOD - Are humans given intrinsic value and rights because they are created by God in his image? Certainly not... too many people don't believe in God, so we need to find another basis for human rights.

NATURE - Does nature show us that it is natural to honor the individual? Definitely no... natural selection and Darwinian principles are all about the strong preying upon the weak, which contradicts everything we believe about human rights.

POSITIVE LAW - Did we create morality through law, custom, etc. because it makes society work better? No way... genocide is considered "wrong" only because those in power say so. But the whole point of human rights is that it enables us to turn to the majority or the strong and insist that they honor the interests of the individual. A society that can create human rights can also end them, and we instinctively know this to be utterly wrong.

So where do human rights come from? Are they just "there"? Is it that we don't create them, but rather discover them as we reflect on our long experience with wrongs and injustice?

Without the existence of God, the fine-tuning of the universe and also human rights just "happen" with no explanation. If God exists, then these things are no longer improbable, but probable. While this is not proof of God, it does show two instances of leaps that one who disbelieves in God must make... instances where it takes more faith to disbelieve than it does to believe.