How do you know God isn't dead?

[Statler Waldorf]

Don't know, exactly....

Oh come on Pocaracas, you know good and well that those are all created by atheists (the 3rd picture was even taken at the American Atheist Conference in Washington DC last year), which certainly doesn’t prove any Christians believe that Jesus was riding dinosaurs.

I then proceeded to use my favorite method... goes something like this:
"
If the world is as I see it (and I assume most humans see the world in the same manner), how did anyone come to get access to the information about any god in a way that enabled them to document so much information regarding such a god?

Yes, that’s a far more appropriate question to be asking. The Christian position however is not that men received a divine revelation from God and then had to remember what God had said in order to write it all down later, but that the words written down by such men were divinely inspired. So God is actually writing the accounts of Jesus’ life through Luke and so on. This removes the Human fallibility aspect.

And why did different people in different places get different information?

Well some of it is corrupted stories of true accounts (most cultures have a flood story and a long day/night story depending upon which side of the Earth they live on), and some of it is just arriving at the wrong god by inference. They were not given different information by God though, for example Christians do not believe that Allah and Yahweh are the same god who gave two different groups different information for instance.

I know Ken Ham [claims he] believes humans rode on dinosaurs, and that they co-existed with us - even roamed the garden of Eden.
I'm not sure about Jesus riding dinosaurs, though.

I’ve never heard ken say that he believe Humans rode dinosaurs, but he does believe the other things, as do most creation scientists. There’s some good arguments to support those positions actually, but it’s one of those things that if you want to believe dinosaurs existed long before Humans you can find evidence to support that and if you want to believe they coexisted you can find evidence to support that too. Usually those sorts of discussions lead to each side missing one another like ships in the night.

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That one is easy

Gods are FICTIONAL characters created by humans - mostly ancient superstitions and myths and legends

Since a "real" god was NEVER proven to be alive - god's only exist in the minds and the imagination of the humans that created them

And that is where they are ALIVE - nothing more real than Leprechauns or Santa Claus - but they exist in those humans minds.

Fictional characters do not have one real characteristic - LIFE - so death is a meaningless term to apply

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Those are some pretty definite statements for a claimed agnostic to make.

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I hate going back multiple pages for this stuff, but my point here was that since we're just making claims without any recourse to anything verifiable, then anything we can imagine is free game. When you say god's logically the most powerful thing evar... you have absolutely no way of demonstrating that, let alone proving that it's literally true. So... since from my perspective we're all just making shit up, I'll continue to do so until you can prove the truth of your claim to the exclusion of mine.

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Well you’re quite simply not following the premises granted by the OP then, so none of its even relevant to this thread.

Okay, so what if god got bored and decided to kill himself? Bam.

A being that cannot die cannot kill itself, again that’s not a logically cogent question to even ask.

You didn't logically arrive at any conclusion, you just asserted it. Having seen your eventual reasoning, my thoughts on this were only confirmed.

I provided a valid and what appears to be a sound syllogism, if you want to critique it be my guest but whining about it doesn’t prove anything.

You would need to have made a rational original claim if you were expecting a rational response.

I did, and trust me, I was not expecting a rational response from you.

Thomas Jefferson: “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”

Thomas Jefferson is not a proper authority on such matters, so that’s just a fallacious appeal to authority.

Sound?

Yup!

We've covered this.

Yes, you claim you have read it, but your displayed ignorance on the subject matter leads me to question that claim.

And a creator powerless to do anything about it?

No…a creator who brings glory to Himself through the punishment of the rebellious creature.

Not nearly as interesting as the fact that I wont get one.

How do you know you won’t? Are you planning on converting sometime soon?

You have a ton to learn about proof, and what it actually it is. I'll help you along here by actually proving you wrong right now so that you will have a much better understand of what proof actually is.

This ought to be good…

A false antecedent is a premise known to be false, fictional, imaginary, or unnecessary. In a conditional sequence, a false antecedent may be the basis for any consequence, true or false.

Yup. That in no way contradicts what I said, premises are assumed to be false until otherwise refuted at which point they become false premises, God’s existence has never been refuted.

The subjects of literature are sometimes false antecedents. For example, the contents of false documents, the origins of stand-alone phenomena, or the implications of loaded words. Also, artificial sources, personalities, events, and histories. False antecedents are sometimes referred to as "nothing", or "nonexistent", whereas nonexistent referents are not referred to.

None of that applies to the God of scripture, so you just wasted your time.

I shouldn't take too much credit, as another poster tried to explane this to you several pages ago to no avail.

No source given for that information? Well how convenient!

Is your name attached to the quote, yes or no?

It doesn’t matter, you were quoting me and if you do it again I’ll have to report it, which I hate doing.

Do you even try to be objective at all or ever?

Why would I try to hold a position that is not possible? I am just intellectually honest and philosophically sophisticated enough to admit I am just as biased as you are. You’re the one being disingenuous by claiming to be objective when such a position is logically impossible to hold.

Every word of that response was completely subjective. And, without any objective appeal, you have no point whatsoever.

I trapped you. You just refuted your claim that Christians do not really believe what they claim to believe because it’s all based upon your subjective opinion on how you think they ought to behave if they really did believe it. Thanks for that.

The truth is, I don't care much for the subject of "God's existence". I see no real point in that discussion.

That’s only because you cannot back up your position concerning that subject.

1. I've asked for verifiable action to prove god is real and active. None has been provided.

That’s only relevant if the personal God feels the need to comply with your silly request, there’s no Biblical support for God ever feeling that need, so that’s an irrelevant argument.

2. I've pointed out scientific impossibilties in the Bible, and I'll admit, I'm no scientist.

Obviously not, or else you’d realize that science only deals with probabilities and therefore there is no such thing as a “scientific impossibility”.

3. I've pointed out inconsistencies in the Bible.

No, you’ve pointed out inconsistencies in your claimed understanding of the Bible, that only proves that you are fallible, which was never really something I doubted to be the case.

4. I've mocked god and lived to tell about it. (The Bible says "God cannot be mocked..." --- Gal 6:7)

You’ve not mocked God.

5. I've challenged believers to prove that prayer is effective. They have not.

Depends on what you mean by effective. I find that prayer is very effective.

I'm sure none of these points are new, but that makes them no less valid. And more are to come. Many more.

You can toss out all the bad arguments you want, they don’t magically add up to a good argument.

Something's very fishy here. Haven't quite put my finger on it, but I suspect I will. It's all a little convenient, that's all I'll say for now.

You really think that you are that good? That no atheist would ever point out the fact you screwed your reasoning up? Such hubris.

That may be the correct answer in the classroom. Never formally studied it myself. However in the real world if you do not want small children to laugh at you as you walk by your premises have to be demonstrably true.

I do not care whether or not children laugh at me, they are hardly rational beings. I see no distinction between how logic works in the classroom and how it works in the “real world”.

The concept exists in my head. When I speak of it, it's implied that I must be speaking in hypothetical terms since I don't believe in it. Therefore, I can rationally speak about your god without believing he exists, because a concept and an object in reality representing the concept are two different things.

Well even conceptually Yahweh cannot die, so whether you are speaking conceptually or existentially either way we know that God is not dead.

But your claims are such that its as if you take it upon yourself that you ought to show why your god "one ups" all other gods, but as soon as I point out a similar trait in some other culture's god, you say my statement has no place in the discussion. Sounds a lot like communism; spreading your "propaganda" and shutting down anyone else who opposes it.

I was not trying to “one up” anything, I was merely using the definition of my God to establish the fact that if He ever existed (which was granted in the OP) we know He is therefore still living.

Why bother spreading that bit of propaganda? You've been appointed as the dictator of this thread from the moment the OP said your god exists in real life. What's the point in saying "God exists. People believe in God. Therefore God exists"?

Simply because the OP didn’t understand what he was actually asking; I merely was pointing out that there are multiple ways to prove that God is still living.

More meaningless propaganda that you're propagating in a thread you've already hijacked.

You may think they are meaningless but I think that the definitions of terms are quite important in a discussion.

Precisely, the discussion was over before it started.

Smax didn’t seem to understand that.

or, you've missed the entire point that everyone has been trying to show you.

What on Earth are you talking about? You’re the one who’s insisted on bringing up irrelevant points over and over again. I think you finally realized that smax granted the existence of Yahweh as a premise in his original post, and now you’re trying to hide the fact you didn’t understand that from the beginning (which was obvious by the fact you were asking for proof of a god everyone already assumed existed at the beginning of the discussion). Oops! Damage control time!

After all this nonsense, we're still at square one: why is all of your hypothetical propaganda which only "makes sense" in your hypothetical nation useful in any way, shape or form in reality? The moment I stop looking at this thread I go back to the world in which your god doesn't exist.

No, the moment you stop looking at this thread you go back to the world in which God still exists.