The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[EvolutionKills]

Gotcha again.. but I believed in god when I was younger and never really read the bible. Then I finally did read the bible three times over and now I really dont believe theres a god...

You just ended up doing three revolutions of the wheel of atheist logic.

Wow, if you could project any harder, you'd be writing your name on the surface of the moon with your dick...

Atheism has always been around since the very first claims about gods were made, long before Yahweh was a twinkle in Abraham's eyes.

It goes back to the around the 17th century though at a push you can find a philosophy resembling it in the classical world in the first couple of centuries BC though they still technically believed in the gods. Just as something of interest though the ancient Jews initially didn't really believe in an afterlife, nothing particularly nice anyway you went into the ground that's where you stayed. So God was very much focused here in this life.

It goes back at least as long as there were 2 people, and when one of them said something about any god/s, and the second thought to themselves 'yeah, that sounds like bullshit...' It could have been as simple as this..



Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2296

The Christians themselves were called "atheists" by their pagan critics.

It's because what they believed in didn't really resemble the proper gods people had been accustomed to.

Because they didn't believe in the gods, the same gods believed by everyone else. Remember that in the culture that Christianity arose, the Pax Romana was a built around culture acceptance and blending. This was rather easy vis-a-vis the Romans, who subsumed the pantheon of their Greek predecessors. Other contemporaries, such as the Egyptians, were respected for being just another way to worship the same gods and aspects, just with different rituals and names. This is why Thoth was seen as an avatar of Mercury, and vice verse; this is a very inclusive policy. This was entirely at odds with the Judaism of first century Judea and early proto-Christian sects who rejected all other gods, and the social inclusion that came with that assimilation.

Christianity was, AFAIK, the first religion ever to claim that not only was their god superior to all the others, that it was the only one up there and everyone else was just praying to idols and imaginary beings.

Well does this look like the kind of being the human mind would invent?

He looks a bit like human to me, the God of the Bible looks nothing like that he looks like nothing at all. You have the invented idols that resemble man and you have the real deal which is in order of magnitude different.

Jacob personally wrestling your God, try again.

Before Christianity, it was common for people to dabble with different gods and different religions depending on their needs at the time.

People still do that's what Wicca and New Age beliefs and all that business is about.

That's the nice thing about deists and pantheists, they believe in woo alright, but at least they're really inclusive about it. You're not going to see them helming anything like the Crusades or the Inquisition.

One could pray to this god for good crops and another god for fertility.

When Anglo Saxon farmers asked who would look after their crops if the gods weren't real they told they had to look after them themselves.

"they told they"

What?

When two cultures went to war, they imagined their gods also fighting up in the heavens. Even those devoted to a particular religion, such as the ancient Jews, didn't deny the existence of the other gods, only that the other gods were weaker. The OT is filled with examples.

In the early part of the Bible the assumption was that the gods of other nations did exist but were trivial things and latter they are depicted as being nothing but idols of carved wood and stone that were capable of doing nothing at all.

What's the first Commandment again?

Thou shalt have no other gods before me?


What was that bit in Genesis 1:26 again?

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:"

If that isn't an admission to the existence and belief in other deities, I don't know what is. Of course this shouldn't surprise you if you knew anything about the polytheistic pagan origins of the Old Testament.