Christianity; the World's Most Violently Persecuted Religion

[Sheldon]

Bel may not be the most diplomatic in his approach, but I think he has a point in saying that we need to engage the actual arguments and conceptions of theologians.  It's easy to start from what we imagine has to be the case, only to find that when we get to the end, some clever Christer has already anticipated our objection.

In the end, their arguments amount for something that just doesn't exist. They need to learn to first prove its existence before expecting to begin the debate with their misconceived notion that a god already exists.

I wholeheartedly concur of course, or even demonstrate in some remotely objective way that a deity or anything supernatural is even possible. The same applies to accurately defining a deity they claim is real, and of course offer some epistemological justification for those claims as well. The fact you can imagine something, then imagine some characteristic it has that isn't in and of itself irrational, does not make it real.

The fact remains, that the more autonomy any entity has, the more culpable it would be for its actions. Yet we have in this very thread a theist claiming a deity exists that created humans (and everything else), and is in no way culpable for the result, that's an absurd claim, even were they not claiming that deity was omniscient, and omnipotent, and of course morally perfect.