Why is belief in a higher power required?

[Ryantology]

According to whom? Why?

Every single argument you make which assumes God exists is meaningless if he doesn't. You can't make a valid point until you establish that God exists.

No, Reductio ad absurdum. If you applied your same skepticism you show towards God’s existence and His word to your own self you’d render all proof impossible. In fact, if your atheism were true, it’d be impossible to know anything at all, so the very fact that we can obtain knowledge is proof God exists.

Nope. It's an appeal to solipsism and nothing else. You're telling me that if I refuse to believe that images my mind generates are anything but mental glitches, I can't believe anything my senses tell me. If that really is true, then I may not even be sitting here typing this post.

The flaw in your argument is that, with special physiological exceptions (and discounting solipsism), we all experience sensory input in mostly the same way. You would not be able to understand what I am trying to tell you if it didn't work that way. We both identify the same wavelengths of light as the same colors, same sounds. If we could not trust them at all, we could never convey useful information or do anything else. Our senses are subject to all manner of glitches and strange phenomena, some we understand and some we don't, but the basis for these glitches is neurochemical every time we trace it to its sources. This is why the only sensory input which is reliable is that which all humans can experience without obviously biased preconditions such as "open your mind to god".

You derive your 'truth' about God from a source nobody in their right mind should ever trust as anything more than a literary artifact from a simpler time, when people made up wild and crazy explanations for phenomena they did not understand. It's just one of thousands of very similar creation myths. The only thing special about yours is that it persists better than some others. Any evidence you claim suggests your God is no different or more credible than the evidence any other religion offers to support its deities or spirits. If your evidence is valid only for you and cannot be shared or empirically studied, there is no reason not to treat you as if you are lying, confused, or insane.

We all actually receive better than we deserve because we live in a Universe created by a gracious God.

Why would God create something and then hold it in such low regard as to suggest that the only thing stopping him from abusing it is that he feels too gracious to do so? It reflects poorly on his own craftsmanship.

Waldorff,
Is the Bible the infallible word of God?
Yes or no.

The originals, yes.

Where are these originals, and how are you certain they actually are original and legitimate?

Those children died to punish the parents, God is justly returning a horror, those children do have eternal life with God, who said God allowed the innocent children and infants to suffer, not scripture.

The children died, therefore the children were punished for the crimes of their parents. Which, for most of them, was the crime of living in Egypt at the wrong time. What monsters.

It's just in the sight of the omniscient God who knows the hearts of all people, so yes it's reasonable. They were all guilty of sin, and like I said God knows their hearts and all of them were worshiping a false God, you know the ones made of wood, stone or metal. You can believe this, they were, if you would read and study scripture you would see it right there in plain English.

God can know everything about everyone and still be evil. That you can read how he is depicted in the Bible and still believe that everything he does is right and just says a lot about the power of religion to program simple minds. Actions speak louder than even God's word.