Q about arguments for God's existence.

[Esquilax]

You need to follow the argument from the beginning. In the beginning I think I was responding to a statement that christianity was responsible for more atrocities than anything else in history. There's too many pages in this thread to go back and review, but someone made a comment about all the people killed due to christianity or by christians. I then made a comment about all the people that were persecuted and killed by atheists. But follow my posts, you will see that my argument exonerated atheists as well as christians. I was blaming the acts on the individuals not their faith or philosophy.

People are big conglomerates of experiences and beliefs and ideas: you can't separate their actions from their motivators and ideals where a direct link can be found. When you've got people actively believing in a divine architect of the universe, and peeking into a holy book to see that, what do you know, they can interpret the scriptures in such a way as to not only justify their chosen course of action, but actually ordain it as the will of the creator, then you've got a set of actions directly attributable to that belief system or religion. You might be tempted to argue that their interpretation was wrong and hence not reflective of the religion itself, and that'd be fine, except that personal experiences and interpretations of scripture are so widespread and encouraged among the believers. You simply cannot have thousands of denominations of christianity, populated by millions of individuals with their own varied spins on what X verse and Y passage really means- and more importantly, why they can ignore every passage that would reflect badly on them or cause society to break down- and then point your finger and say that no, these specific interpretations are incorrect.

Personal interpretation is a cornerstone of modern christianity. Setting up a system whereby one can selectively interpret scripture out of existence, and then disowning people when they do it in a way you don't want them to, is trying to have your cake and eat it too. Don't go there.

I think that without christianity in the world, there would be more atrocities committed. Take a look at the ancient pagan nations and, of course, communist nations. Take away christianity and the void will be filled with something that's really evil. There's always something there.

And again, pointing at someone else and saying "they're worse," doesn't make you any better. The existence of other bad things doesn't transform christianity into a good thing; I actually know that other religions are bad too. I'm an atheist, you know? I think they're all a waste of time and utterly toxic to a certain kind of person. You don't need to keep reminding me.

It's like you're throwing out all these other bad things like they're cover, that's going to distract us from the badness of christianity, or redirect focus. Surprisingly, I'm capable of disliking multiple things at once, and my ability to identify moral evils is not some finite source that I can run out of.