I'm too dumb to be an atheist

[Whateverist]

As for wondering how everything could come from nothing, I wonder if you've ever questioned what evidence you have for thinking that there was ever an absolute, total nothing before there was anything at all. Christians don't believe that. They think the means to everything was already there all along in the form of God. Physicists don't think that either. They think each successive state of the universe(s) were always preceded by the necessary pre-existing conditions. The only difference is the scientists don't begin by assuming they already know everything.

By definition everything had to originate from Nothing. The stumbling block is that it is very difficult to understand what Nothing is and what its properties are.

When the Earth was first formed did it have any dirt on it?

Not sure I follow. Do you mean each item in the cosmos, such as our Earth, had to have originated from nothing? Because that much we know is not true. The blob of debree whose gravitational field led to the formation of our solar system with the greatest mass of debree conscentrated in what was to become our sun. But owing to the rotation of the field about its center became stabilized in rotation rather than crowding into the center. One such ring became our planet.

I don't think this makes a good example of anything coming from nothing. The earth and our solar system arose following multiple generations of larger, less stable stars whose destruction created debree fields one of which, eventually, became ours. I find no "nothing" in this story.

There is a huge difference between saying before I was born the world was devoid of me versus saying before I was born there was absolutely nothing. Choose anything currently existing, sure there was a time before which it existed. But none of it sprang from nothing. Anything can always and only come from recycled and transformed states of what there was before. As proof I offer this entire bald assertion. QED

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You're right, but with all the learned people attesting to experiences with a god throught human history, it leaves it open for consideration.

Experiences with God are not evidence of God. They're anecdotes.

At the very least "experiences" of anything are first of all the product of the interface between our cognitive-perceptual capacities and whatever there may be out there. Some experiences are generated entirely on-board, such as dreams. They can feel real while you're dreaming and of course they are real - as dreams. They are "on-board" phenomena.

Anecdotes of interfacing with God are likewise on-board phenomenon. They are real as experience but there is no guarantee of linkage to anything out there in the world beyond us.

Remember learned people have been "attesting to dreams" too through all of human history. Some cultures believe there are real and important connections between dream time and waking time, and there probably are .. but there is no reason to posit a parallel universe for this. Our brains are able to generate it just fine.

Connecting experiences of God to the bible in a literal way is a clumsy and stupid way to understand ones experience of God. If you're really interested in God you should follow what you experience directly and not trade it in for the bible. If God is anything at all and you settle for the bible, He would be disappointed.