Nature's Laws

[Esquilax]

I'm just telling you what I find convincing.

Yes, but the big problem is that you can't tell me why you find these things convincing, or even why the things you're saying are in any way connected to a god. You say you believe in god because of moral absolutes, but when I tell you that you haven't established that moral absolutes exist, you continue to not do that and just presuppose that they do. And then when I ask you why you think moral absolutes require your specific christian god, you just list one of the things you think is a moral absolute because the bible claims your god said it, which is a circular argument; you're saying that moral absolutes are evidence of god, and that you know what things are moral absolutes because your god said them. You're using one claim to validate another, and then using that second claim to validate the first, but if either of those claims is untrue, then your entire position falls apart, and you certainly haven't given us any reason to believe either is true.

Do you really not understand what a circular argument is? Do we need to go that basic with you?

I can't convert anyone.

You could convert me, if you had evidence and not merely a bucket of assertions.

Just as my conversion was a miracle, so it is for all who, by faith, are saved in Christ.

Conversions aren't miracles, they are entirely natural events that take place in the material world; there's nothing magical about a person changing their mind, nor benefiting from that. If you're insisting that this is a miracle then you're denuding the word of all meaning.

 

As I've said, God brought me to a point at which it began to require vastly more faith to remain an atheist than it took for me to believe in the God of the bible. 

Yeah, if you're dead set on just attributing everything good that happens to you to god, with no reason to, then of course you're going to see good things happen as a result of your belief in god, because you've just defined everything by fiat as from your god. The problem is that you don't have a reason to attribute the things you do to god, and your presupposition could not be evidence for anyone else, in any case.

As I began to evaluate my atheism after reading "Evidence" I began to realize that atheism isn't something positive (like an explanatory and conceptually fulfilling world view), it is merely the negation (or rejection) of theism.

Basically, yeah; atheism is a single position, not a worldview in itself. So what?

Do you care if anything in the explanatory worldview you currently hold is true, or does it just matter that it explains things, even if those explanations are wrong?

  Since atheism is nothing more than that, it doesn't contain or support, and it isn't trying to contain or support, any kind of philosophical foundation for morality, the origins of life, or anything else.  Atheism is highly prized as if it were really something wonderful by those who reject theism, but it is nothing but the rejection of theism.  It is nothing!  How can "nothing" make a person free?

If the alternative to that nothing is the strictures and unjustified demands of a fictional god and his cadre of sycophants and conmen... it's certainly freeing by comparison.