Best Theistic Arguments

[robvalue]

It's not that these things don't need evidence, it's that there can't ever be any evidence for or against them because they are untestable/unfalsifiable. That's exactly how religion gets away with all this. As soon as it tries to step into the realm of the testable, it fails immediately.

[KittyAnn]

Saved us from damnation by whom? Himself, I imagine.

Death was his own invention. If he wanted us to live forever he could have just done that to begin with! Heaven seems like Earth 2.0 where God corrects all his mistakes.

God gave us free will and we sinned so much that he didn't want to see us in his Kingdom ... and this is eternal damnation ... inability to enter the Kingdom of God!!
... but God has mercy on us and he sent his son to help us saved .. but we still have free will and we still can choose but now we keep chances in spite of our bad choices ... then we were without a chance ... or the kingdom or not..
I don't think so that God corrects his mistakes ... I think that from the beginning He wanted to show us at some point of existence of humanity that despite our bad choices, very bad choices he still has mercy for us ... and if he did it right away ... maybe already we would have forgotten it ... maybe he will reveal his mercy to us again to remind us about His mercy..????
Maybe we theists are wrong or you atheists are wrong, or maybe we are all wrong ...Who knows... But this is my faith.. not science, not a fairy tale...just my Faith!

[pocaracas]

But we know that people die. All people die.

Eternal damnation is part of the myth... along with eternal life. How can anyone verify that those things happen?

of course, that we all die, the body of each of us dies ... it is a part of the divine plan, we live and we die... but we still have a soul that doesn't die with the body ... and thanks to the Son of God who came into the world and he gave lives for us, that is, washed away our sins. ... but also at the same time He resurrected, that is, he conquered death and gave us this promise of eternal life ... he freed our souls from eternal damnation... of course verify this is it true, is not so easy for most of us.. it depends of our faith, how we read the signs over the centuries... but this is faith, not science...faith from science differs in that it don't need evidence at every turn..maybe a small revelation, miracle...that's all in my opinion  

The bits I highlighted are the tricky ones.... everything else can flow from the typical Willing suspension of Disbelief that we commonly apply when watching certain movies or reading certain stories - like Superman.

Do we really have a soul?
Is there really a god? Is there really a son of that god?
How can one tell? Faith is just a word for what we can call "unwilling suspension of disbelief"... Somehow, you got convinced that those things are real. How? Looking back through your life, all the way to your childhood, how did you develop that faith? How did you develop that acceptance of something that rational people should naturally disbelieve?

[robvalue]

Saved us from damnation by whom? Himself, I imagine.

Death was his own invention. If he wanted us to live forever he could have just done that to begin with! Heaven seems like Earth 2.0 where God corrects all his mistakes.

God gave us free will and we sinned so much that he didn't want to see us in his Kingdom ... and this is eternal damnation ... inability to enter the Kingdom of God!!
... but God has mercy on us and he sent his son to help us saved .. but we still have free will and we still can choose but now we keep chances in spite of our bad choices ... then we were without a chance ... or the kingdom or not..
I don't think so that God corrects his mistakes ... I think that from the beginning He wanted to show us at some point of existence of humanity that despite our bad choices, very bad choices he still has mercy for us ... and if he did it right away ... maybe already we would have forgotten it ... maybe he will reveal his mercy to us again to remind us about His mercy..????
Maybe we theists are wrong or you atheists are wrong, or maybe we are all wrong ...Who knows... But this is my faith.. not science, not a fairy tale...just my Faith!

Fair enough

This all sounds very much to me like God putting obstacles in his own way, then removing them, and expecting thanks.

What bad choices did I make? If God chooses to blame me for things other people have done, that's his problem, and if he has to go through some strange procedures in order to like me again, that's also his problem. He just seems like a weird dude!

Of course I have made bad choices, everyone has, but that's inevitable and so he set himself up to fail there if that's all it takes for him to dislike us. But then he does a load of stuff and likes us again anyway... it seems like pointless theatre which ends up exactly where it started.

Just my take on it I'm not trying to attack you, just calling it all as I see it. It makes no sense to me at all. I guess I'm not going to be forgiven either because I don't want to be a Christian.

---

PS: I wouldn't want to spend any time with this crazy God character anyway so I'd prefer him to just let me die when I die. If he wants to torture me for that, there's not much I can do about that. It would just reaffirm my belief that it's crazy.

[KittyAnn]

God gave us free will and we sinned so much that he didn't want to see us in his Kingdom ... and this is eternal damnation ... inability to enter the Kingdom of God!!
... but God has mercy on us and he sent his son to help us saved .. but we still have free will and we still can choose but now we keep chances in spite of our bad choices ... then we were without a chance ... or the kingdom or not..
I don't think so that God corrects his mistakes ... I think that from the beginning He wanted to show us at some point of existence of humanity that despite our bad choices, very bad choices he still has mercy for us ... and if he did it right away ... maybe already we would have forgotten it ... maybe he will reveal his mercy to us again to remind us about His mercy..????
Maybe we theists are wrong or you atheists are wrong, or maybe we are all wrong ...Who knows... But this is my faith.. not science, not a fairy tale...just my Faith!

Fair enough

This all sounds very much to me like God putting obstacles in his own way, then removing them, and expecting thanks.

What bad choices did I make? If God chooses to blame me for things other people have done, that's his problem, and if he has to go through some strange procedures in order to like me again, that's also his problem. He just seems like a weird dude!

Of course I have made bad choices, everyone has, but that's inevitable and so he set himself up to fail there if that's all it takes for him to dislike us. But then he does a load of stuff and likes us again anyway... it seems like pointless theatre which ends up exactly where it started.

Just my take on it I'm not trying to attack you, just calling it all as I see it. It makes no sense to me at all. I guess I'm not going to be forgiven either because I don't want to be a Christian.

---

PS: I wouldn't want to spend any time with this crazy God character anyway so I'd prefer him to just let me die when I die. If he wants to torture me for that, there's not much I can do about that. It would just reaffirm my belief that it's crazy.

It's ok...I don't feel attacked..c'est la vie ..and i don't think so you're not going to be forgiven ... nobody knows, and this is beautiful!
and I wish you a beautiful life!!!

[robvalue]

I wish you the same too

The story sounds to me like an abusive relationship. I get kicked out the house because I've apparently broken some rules, or someone else broke some rules, without the abuser actually talking to me about what I've supposedly done.

The abuser then agrees to "forgive" me, and "save" me from having to live on the street, if I then adopt certain beliefs/rituals. I still don't even get to talk to them; I get cryptic messages sent to me, several in fact, from which I'm meant to decipher the real message and meaning.

The same guy is holding all the cards, while making it seem like there's actually some sort of reason why things can't be done in a straightforward way.

[KittyAnn]

of course, that we all die, the body of each of us dies ... it is a part of the divine plan, we live and we die... but we still have a soul that doesn't die with the body ... and thanks to the Son of God who came into the world and he gave lives for us, that is, washed away our sins. ... but also at the same time He resurrected, that is, he conquered death and gave us this promise of eternal life ... he freed our souls from eternal damnation... of course verify this is it true, is not so easy for most of us.. it depends of our faith, how we read the signs over the centuries... but this is faith, not science...faith from science differs in that it don't need evidence at every turn..maybe a small revelation, miracle...that's all in my opinion  

The bits I highlighted are the tricky ones.... everything else can flow from the typical Willing suspension of Disbelief that we commonly apply when watching certain movies or reading certain stories - like Superman.

Do we really have a soul?
Is there really a god? Is there really a son of that god?
How can one tell? Faith is just a word for what we can call "unwilling suspension of disbelief"... Somehow, you got convinced that those things are real. How? Looking back through your life, all the way to your childhood, how did you develop that faith? How did you develop that acceptance of something that rational people should naturally disbelieve?

You are just looking straight, you do not look side to side and behind you .. you only look through the science and formulas thanks to which you can solve everything (but it's ok this is your free will).... but you know that even in science, not everything is like mathematical formulas shows us... how many times the theorists should say yes and yes ... even the result is unambiguous, because the numbers are not wrong .. but the experiment goes its own way ... why? beacuse people sometimes are wrong!
we are not always able to predict, understand and prove everything ... sometimes it happens after years, decades ... and sometimes never in our lifetime..

I don't think so that's faith is just a word for what we can call "unwilling suspension of disbelief"... I could say the definition of faith contains two aspects: intellectual assent and trust. Intellectual assent is believing something to be true. Trust is actually relying on the fact that the something is true. A chair is often used to help illustrate this. I heard this explanations long time ago and i liked it, so.... intellectual assent is recognizing that a chair is a chair and agreeing that it is designed to support a person who sits on it. Trust is actually sitting in the chair. Trying to understand these two aspects of faith is crucial. Many people believe certain facts about Jesus Christ. Many people will intellectually agree with the facts the Bible declares about Jesus. But knowing those facts to be true is not what the Bible means by “faith.” The biblical definition of faith requires intellectual assent to the facts and trust in the facts. ..this only some part of these..

And yes i believ i have a soul, i want to believe.  he "soul” in the Bible is a translation of the Hebrew word neʹphesh and the Greek word psy·kheʹ. The Hebrew word literally means “a creature that breathes,” and the Greek word means “a living being.” * The soul, then, is the entire creature, not something inside that survives the death of the body. Consider how the Bible shows that the human soul is the whole person: Adam, a living soul, at the time of his creation..  Adam was not given a soul—he “became a living soul”.  When Jehovah God created the first man, Adam, the Bible says that “man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7, King Jacob Version) Adam was not given a soul—he became a living soul, or person. The Bible says also that the soul can work, crave food, eat, obey laws, and touch a dead body. (Leviticus 5:2; 7:20; 23:30; Deuteronomy 12:20; Romans 13:1) Those activities involve the entire person. And Is the soul immortal? No, the soul can die. Dozens of Bible verses refer to the soul as being mortal. Here are some examples: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”(Ezekiel 18:4, 20, King Jacob Version.) and many many others example...

I never convinced myself that these things are real...I received such education from my mother, I finished Catholic school, I learned about different religions in school ... I read the Bible,  I go to church and i just intellectually agree with these and i trust... that's my faith that's all  

[robvalue]

We trust that sitting on a chair will work because we've done it many times before, and it has worked. It had the chance to fail, and it didn't. We use information about the past to make useful predictions about the future; that's the essence of science. It's a scientific prediction.

This is very different to "having faith" in things that we have no possible way of testing; especially those that involve concepts not demonstrated to be real.

I'll shut up and leave you alone now!

[KittyAnn]

I wish you the same too

The story sounds to me like an abusive relationship. I get kicked out the house because I've apparently broken some rules, or someone else broke some rules, without the abuser actually talking to me about what I've supposedly done.

The abuser then agrees to "forgive" me, and "save" me from having to live on the street, if I then adopt certain beliefs/rituals. I still don't even get to talk to them; I get cryptic messages sent to me, several in fact, from which I'm meant to decipher the real message and meaning.

The same guy is holding all the cards, while making it seem like there's actually some sort of reason why things can't be done in a straightforward way.

It's not that you did something wrong, you broken the rules or you didn't do anything ... or someone else did it ... and you were kicked out of the house... God can not choose only one and forgive him, He must do so with all ... or all of his creation or nobody ... but He can forgive all mankind only because of "one just" and it is beautiful!! didn't you want mom to forgive you when you did something wrong? .....even if you have't done anything wrong and for some reason your parents were angry at you, you wanted them to forgive you, right? and you knew it that parents love all children equally well despite the time you didn't feel this... tese are almost the same relationships .... but God loves us more.. unbelievably stronger ... because the earthly father can fail but the heavenly Father never!... even if you don't believe 😉....
beautiful life and all the best!!!

[robvalue]

I appreciate your kind wishes. But if I am god's child, he doesn't love me. He allows me to suffer extremely to the point where I've wanted to die for the last 10 years. If that's love, I wouldn't want to know what hate was.

Analogies with humans don't work because humans are fallible, have limited power and resources, can't see the future and didn't create the very fabric of reality and the rules by which it operates. The buck stops with god as far as I'm concerned. The only way to defend him is to paint him as much less than all-powerful. I made a video about this recently:





My lack of belief in God has nothing to do with being miserable, of course. Even if I did believe in him, I'd have no desire to join any religion. Sensible discourse I would always be open to, but there has been none from him.