Why is belief in a higher power required?

[Statler Waldorf]

I don't actually make a positive claim that God doesn't exist (if only because I know how readily Christians like you will latch onto that point to shift attention away from the fact that you can't prove your positive claim).

It doesn’t matter whether it is positive or not (even though it is); you still share the burden of proof.

All I state is a simple fact: no evidence exists suggesting God does exist. And you don't help by not providing any.

I didn’t provide evidence, I provided proof: you.

Prove this assertion.

Prove what assertion?

Assertions don't prove assertions. I'm sorry, but this is not proof that your God exists.

It was not a mere assertion, it was supported by you. You could not justify your belief that your senses were reliable, and yet a Christian can.

My beliefs, themselves, have nothing to do with your God or scripture.

And yet they’re only justified if the God of scripture exists; so I’d say they have a lot to do with Him.

Unsupported assertions don't even begin to qualify as evidence that your God exists.

That’s correct, but supported ones do, and you’ve supported that assertion for me.

Unsupported assertions don't prove other unsupported assertions. Is this all you have? You really suck at this.

Actually I’d say you’re the one who sucks at all of this, here you have helped me demonstrate exactly what I said I’d demonstrate, and you still seem to be oblivious to the fact that you did it for me.

God planned to regret his decision? That sounds logical.

God planned to exhibit His might and wrath through the destruction of the wicked yes.

Such shoddy standards you have for discovering facts. There's no proof that any original manuscript is the original form of the story you know. Tales were often passed by word of mouth, sometimes for centuries, before someone committed them to paper.

You seem to be ignorant of how the Jews would learn and pass their oral traditions down through the generations, it is actually rather amazing. The Bible is the best preserved and attested book we have of antiquity, scholars all agree on that.

Of course. And you have no idea what it is, a rough idea of what it said, and no idea where the actual stories originated or the forms they first took. Ever heard of the game "Telephone"?

Yup, and if you told thousands of people the sentence in “telephone” you could easily get back to the original sentence by examining the similarities and variances in the copies. You act like there is only one manuscript copy we have, we have thousands, and they were separated by hundreds of miles isolating them from tampering. We know what the originals said to an amazing degree of certainty.

If I am to believe that the Bible is the truth of the universe as delivered by a perfect god, the tiniest flaw calls the entire text into question.

Why? How would you know it was a flaw existed?

Of course it's a starting point, the point from which the legitimacy of all copies follow. Until you establish the legitimacy of your story, it's only true to you because you want it to be true.

What did you say about assertions? Care to back yours up?

Yet, you dispute me when I merely repeat what they say?

If I recall correctly, that was not the definition of evil you gave.

I've just finished responding to one.

Ok, which one? Why is it terrible? Be specific.