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Forums - General - Doe it really matter if God exists or not...?

 

I am

Theist 96 20.25%
 
Atheist 178 37.55%
 
Agnostic 96 20.25%
 
Spiritual but non theist 29 6.12%
 
Other 32 6.75%
 
God. 43 9.07%
 
Total:474
Peh said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

No, no, no! You see even though the clay tablets predate the earliest biblical flood text by 900 years, it was the Babylonians that stole the flood story from the Hebrews. See, the Hebrews have a long history of Oral transmission, and this obviously means that they passed the flood story down through word of mouth for nearly a thousand years before those dirty Babylonians conquered them, and committed cultural apropriation!

God should have taught the hebrews how to write so they wouldn't look like plagiarists.

He gave them Oral Tradition which is far more accurrate than modern writing. You see, Oral Tradition wasn't like the game of telephone at all. In ancient Hebrew society aspiring priests were made to memorize every story word by word, before becoming a priest. After becoming a priest if they told the story differently by just a single word, they were executed. And luckily for the Hebrews, God also gave them a langauge which was so perfect that it remained the same over a thousand years. Unlike poor primitive english which has older versions that modern people can barely understand (shakespeare), ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew are IDENTICAL! And that's why they could pass the flood story down through the ages without changing a single word, and still understand it perfectly hundreds of years later! We know all this thanks to the hard work of proffessor I.M. Right from Baby Jesus University. 

Ok real talk time. 

There's more proof from 2000 years ago. Jesus predicted the world was going to end before the lifetimes of his original followers ended. This is recorded in the Mini-Apocalypse of Mathew, Mark and Luke. Obviously the world is still turning and Jesus was wrong. But if he was wrong he wasn't God. 



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If God doesn't exist, there is no wrong or right. If God exists, there is wrong (what God diskes) and right (what God approves) and there are consequences for both.



Birimbau said:

If God doesn't exist, there is no wrong or right. If God exists, there is wrong (what God diskes) and right (what God approves) and there are consequences for both.

Not sure what your settings are, but scroll up or go back one page. I already refuted that argument completely. 



DevilRising said:
o_O.Q said:

it does because without god objective morality cannot exist

 

 

That's kind of silly. Of course it can. There is such a thing a "Universal Morality", aka "Killing is wrong", "Rape is wrong", etc. It's universal because most cultures in the world recognize these things, making it universal. The only way that morality becomes "relative", is in gray area issues, surprinsingly, where differences in religion arise, such as Islam thinking it's "immoral" of women to have their heads uncovered, or Jews and Muslims thinking that it's "immoral" to eat certain foods or foods prepared a certain way.





But as for whether or not it's important to know if there IS a "God", or "Souls", etc., or not, I would say the answer to any intellectual should be: YES. Even if you're an atheist, it would be very important to know whether or not your belief that gods/souls DON'T exist, is correct, right? And if they DO exist, I would think any thinking mind would want to know that for a verified fact. It's the kind of thing that would be nice to know.


 

killing was wrong in nazi germany? or the soviet union? or the middle ages? is killing wrong now where america is given free license to bomb countries till they collapse killing millions of people at a time?

you appear to be fairly ignorant of history and the world around you



I see the world as godless to begin with so if I somehow got confirmation that there was no god it wouldn't matter to me because it would fit exactly into understanding of the world.

If the existence of a god was proven then it would be quite significant to me, I'd want to find out more about it, even if it turned out that god didn't care one bit about the universe and had no afterlife and such, I'd still be interested in how such a thing exists and what it does.

But if god did turn out to be just the guy who switched the universe on and left it alone then it probably wouldn't make a difference to many people, some might abandon religion but I doubt most would given that religion is still strong despite how much science can undermine, disprove and oppose it already. Perhaps we could gain some important knowledge that we could later utilise from investigating god though.

This is very hypothetical though because exactly what god is, if it was discovered, is not certain.



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A_C_E said:
o_O.Q said:

laws change with the times or in other words they are subjective

Th Old Testament. The New Testament. King James. Apparently laws aren't the only things that change...hmmm.

 

i wasn't talking specifically about the bible with regards to why god is important for morality

but regardless i do believe a lot of the stories in the bible are misinterpreted and are allegories for deeper meanings that we've lost comprehension of



o_O.Q said:
A_C_E said:

Th Old Testament. The New Testament. King James. Apparently laws aren't the only things that change...hmmm.

 

i wasn't talking specifically about the bible with regards to why god is important for morality

but regardless i do believe a lot of the stories in the bible are misinterpreted and are allegories for deeper meanings that we've lost comprehension of

What is your objective method of determining which parts of the bible are allegory, and which parts are literal? 



JWeinCom said:
numberwang said:

The letters of Paul are dated to his lifetime, so directly in the years after Jesus' death and before the destruction of Jerusalem (40-68 AD)

Yeah, I got my times wrong.  For some reason I was counting from 1 CE.  Still, even several years is enough for a story to be distorted.

Paul converses with Peter and James (brother of Jesus), the latter became the first leader of the church of Jerusalem, so there were authority figures to validate teachings.



Qwark said:
o_O.Q said:

yes that's what i was saying - without the concept of a god morality can't be objective and changes to suit whatever whims people have

Works fine these days if anything I digest gid morality because it stands in the way of medical advancement. Wasn't it moral during the dark ages to impregnate a minor btw. So be glad morals change over time because you don't want to live in a age which had the exact same morals as during the dark ages.

 

well I suppose you'll think that way until you are the one that ends up being oppressed... what makes you think btw that the human race will never reach a time in the future where our morals are corrupted to the point they were in the middle ages?



Scientifically speaking we are just a configuration of atoms and atoms don't care what configuration they are in so scientifically morality doesn't matter and it only matters to yourself. Since we could easily imagine a different configuration of atoms that had a completely different morality technically morality is completely arbitrary. You can't even appeal to evolution and Biology because atoms existed before DNA and atom didn't care before whether they would be arranged in a DNA and that the pattern would extended and they won't care after when DNA ceases to exist.

Only people care and people are their own unique configurations of atoms so if your an atheist it is pointless to wonder whether God existence is important or to even ask for proof of Gods existence because you can't even proof that you exist.

Say you were cut in half vertically and almost instantaneously through extremely advanced technology each half was fixed to regenerate their missing halves. Now which one is you? Using this one example it becomes clear that there is no logical or scientific construction that can prove your existence apart from the configuration of your atoms. So there could be a million copies of you all exactly the same and there would be no way for you to tell the difference.

So you can't even prove your own existence as a individual entity let alone the existence of God there are only atoms that will eventually ease to exist. One atom isn't any more important than any other. So as long as you who are mere configurations of atoms, which aren't any important then each individual atoms, continue to exist; don't fool yourself that you know anything. If you did know anything it would just be an accident based on the random motion of atoms based on the pointless unpredictable reality of quantum mechanics, so you can't actually prove anything because there is no fundamental reality that can distinguished between configurations of atoms that can know truth and those that don't. Because after all what reason is there that everything that you know could have been different, the whole universe could have been different.

Of course that is unless you reject the fundamental premise that there is nothing but atoms and energy. But then what would that be. If you are still reading this and are an atheist ask yourself why would you reply? Why does anything matter. Why would one configuration of atoms that has no control of its own configuration's past and consequently its future, attempt to try and change the configuration of another set of atoms when you can't prove that one configuration is more important than another?