Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

[Scisca]

LuccaCardoso1 said: 

Filix already responded pretty well to the "authoritarian regimes were atheist" argument, but I want to point two things:

1. Most revolutions lead to a lot of deaths, it's not exclusive to the French Revolution. And the French Revolution also led to a huge wave of scientific advances, that sped up technological and medical research. Let me cite some other events that killed a huge number of people (I'm using the geometric mean estimate) (for reference, the Reign of Terror killed ~26k people): 

- The European colonization of the Americas: 34 million killed. All of the countries that colonized America were strongly Christian.

- The Hundred Years' War: 2.8 million killed. Both England and France were strongly Christian.

- The Crusades: 1.7 million killed. Happened because of Christianity.

And those are just the most famous examples.

2. God, according to the Bible, killed every single human but 8. That'd have been the largest manslaughter ever. And he also created abortion, natural abortion is a thing.

Sadly, Your arguments are very flawed out of ignorance.

Reign of Terror at 26k? Are you kidding? That's not the number of victims, that's a very conservative estimate of people sentenced and executed. All the victims are hard to estimate, due to lack of precise data, but some estimates are up to 600k.

 

Colonization - the absolute majority of people died because of illnesses. For a long time Europeans weren't even aware that people in America were dying by the millions.

Moreover, The Church actually has a great card when it comes to how it reacted to discoveries and colonization. When missionaries from the Dominican Order told the Pope what the cutthroats and fugitives (who most sailors were at that time, not "strongly Christian" xD ) were doing in America, he issued the legendary bull "Sublimis Deus" (1537), which said that all people Europeans discover are fully rational human beings with souls, had the right to freedom and private property, even if they didn't convert and chose to remained pagan. Has anyone other than the Catholic Church condemned slavery in the next 300 years of enlightment? Don't think so.

Sublimis Deus came with Pastorale Officium, which enlisted harsh punishments for enslaving natives and robbing them of their property. Punishments that the Church enforced, which caused huge tensions. What is more, in order to protect the natives, the Church built Jesuit reductions, where natives could find shelter from bandeirantes and other slaver bandits. They were arming locals, so that they could defend themselves, which even led to a war. This is also the only reason why the Guarani culture and language survived and is now spoken by 7 mln people and is the official language in Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.

That's what the Church did, these were Christian values in action. Bandits and European rulers blinded by greed and lust for conquest acted against the Christian values, laws, the Church and Pope, so claiming that this is a stain on Christianity is unacceptable. When the Church saw, what the secular rulers were doing, it came to the aid of the oppressed ones and paid a big price for it - the Holy Roman Emperor paid the Pope a "friendly visit" only a year after the Pope banned slavery of the natives...

The Crusades - contrary to what most people today think, crusades were defensive wars and saying that they happened "because of Christianiaty" is blasphemy. The crusades happened, because the Christian Middle East was invaded by Muslims. Let me remind you, that at that point in time the population of Middle East where Crusades took place was Christian and Jewish (and possibly Zoroastrian), while Muslims were only the invaders from outside. That region has been the very core of Christianity for centuries at that point with leading Christian think-tanks, cultural and religious places. Christians were defending their land and people. Unfortunately we lost. You have a flawed perspective, because today Middle East is Muslim, but that wasn't the case back then.

Hundred Year's War and other wars - people aren't perfect - all the more reason why we need to trust God instead of humans. Just because Christians sin and break the rules of their faith, doesn't invalidate or discredit these rules or imply that we should abandom them. Nobody is perfect, even the Pope has his own confessor...

 

AD. 2 - God is God and isn't bound by human rules. Also, Catholics don't take The Old Testament literarly, but in the light of the teachings of Jesus. Jewish vision of God is brutal, but Christian God is merciful and loving.