(January 16, 2016 at 6:40 pm)athrock Wrote: I mean, if you're going to be a REAL atheist, you've got to think outside the box of Western society and have reasons for rejecting more than just the nasty God of the OT, don't you think?
There are degrees of certainty, and correspondingly, degrees of uncertainty. Russell's proverbial "celestial teapot" comes to mind. It's not a "good god" versus a "bad", but inconsistencies in the thoughts of Christians, now and in the past, that lead to untenable conclusions. After all, the OT genocides were, for centuries, accepted by nearly everyone; in fact, it was only in the 15th-century, with the advent of Jon Hus, that history records any type of "dissent" against the universal consent of capital punishment "in mass". Showing a religion to be inconsistent with itself, IMO, strengthens the claims that it is intrinsically false and devoid of any revelatory truth. You can certainly be a "generic monotheist" but if you are asked about god, you can assert absolutely nothing about him/her/it.
