Lots of bashing for the belief of God....

[GameOver22]

r505Matt said:

pizzahut451 said:

dib8rman said:

RCTjunkie said:

I find that on the internet forums, people are very respectful to different genders, races, and sexual orientations, but there is something about the belief in God that pushes some (certainly not all) people to become extremely bigoted, more generalizing, and overall more hateful and hostile to this specific group of people. 

Take this random quote:

"I've noticed Christians are hypocrites."

What if we replaced "Christains" with another group:

"I've noticed African Americans are hypocrites."

It seems more hateful and politically incorrect, right? So why is it that people with a belief in God are seemingly excluded for the political corectness that help protects so many other groups?

I know certain groups of people were oppressed over time, but there should be a call for equality, not revenge......

Maybe I'm just too sensitive, but it just comes off that way to me......

Starting today I'm going to start beliving in African American belief diety thing-a-mabob.. damn does that even make sense?

Last I checked a good chunk of African Americans were theists though so then can a theist still be a theist but also be atheist?

I know being a pinker pigment doesn't make you a theist or atheist though... why am I even bothering.

Sad OP is sad. World views are to be criticized and ridiculed when asserted to be correct without any evidence to the claim. In the theist case the very virtue of Christianity is the absence of evidence aka faith.

And  how is atheism any diffrent than Christianity when it comes to evidence and faith? Is there any evidence that supports non-existance of God? HELL NO. Atheist believe theire is no God based on no evidence. Christians beleive there is a God based on no evidence. So we should ridicule Atehism as well right? But, Richard Dawking forbiid than anyone thinks anything even remotly bad about your supeiror beleif. Stop acting like atheism is a proven beleif or something. its not even close to that.

This is one of the more ridiculous things I've read in one of these kinds of discussions. Let's set this up simply (though it is probably falsely dichotomous). If there is no God, there cannot be evidence for either side of the debate. It would be impossible to find evidence supporting or disproving the existence of God. You cannot prove or disprove something that does not exist.

However, if there is a God, then there could be evidence to prove the existence of God, but there will still be no evidence to disprove God's existence. In both cases, you cannot have evidence to disprove something, it is logically impossible, therefore the burden of proof falls on believers, not atheists.

Now again, this is assuming a dichotomy when that's not really the case, so I think it's better to say whether or not there is a higher power or not. Since God and other possible celestial beings can be classified as a higher power, that wording probably works better. 

Lastly, it can be difficult to discern what is actually evidence and what is merely just a 'red herring' in the end. Maybe there is some true evidence in the Bible or Koran or other religious work that truly points to a higher power but we will probably never know (in life that is).

First off, I like your posts. You raise some good points.

With your claim, "You cannot prove or disprove something that does not exist", the truth of this statement depends on your criteria for knowledge. I can definitely make a strong inductive argument for the non-existence of unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster, the little green man who sits in my hand, etc. I can base these arguments off of observations. Their truth will never reach certainty, but I would still classify these inductive arguments as proof that these things do not exist.

However, the statement is clearly false when moving away from observation and into the meaning of terms. I can prove without observation that there is no such thing as a square-circle because of the meaning of the terms square and circle. You can transplant any counter-example in here and get similar results using characteristics such as color, weight, measurement, etc.