Let's be honest

[Mister Agenda]

@Kingpin, IMHO every demonstration for the existence of God presupposes a philosophical framework. For example the logic of the 5 Ways are impeccable and the premises sound but it only works if you accept the assumptions of classical philosophy regarding infinite regress and honor basic distinctions between potentiality/actuality, etc. What tends to happen is the apologist defends the argument while to atheist goes meta to sidestep the argument, either to nihilism or their substitute god of the multiverse.

The multiverse is a hypothesis some physicists and cosmologists have proposed to explain certain observations. I'm not a nihilist, so can you walk me through how the multiverse is my god?

[Mister Agenda]

Not sure how you get to the claim that a matter creating god is necessarily immaterial.

The idea is that before God created matter, there was no matter.

If God was made of matter, then there was already matter. 

So the thing that created matter couldn't be made of matter.

Or, before God created existence there was no existence, therefore God didn't exist to create existence. You overcome this by restating it as 'before God created existence, nothing but God existed'. You could easily go the same way with matter: Before God created matter, God was the only material thing.

Apologies and credit to HappySkeptic, who ninja'd me on this point.

[The Grand Nudger]

God isn't made of matter, god is matter. God is everything, and like nothing else. The idea, in classical theology, is that god is not only different from every other x in terms of what properties it possesses, but also in how it possesses those properties.

[A. Secular Human]

I was exiled from Sunday School when I was seven, for asking awkward questions about the Noachian myth.

Me, too.  I was exiled to the "big" church, with my parents.

Can't have someone messing with the "get 'em while they're young" indoctrination, now, can we?

[Paleophyte]

OK, reaching out to my agnostic/atheist friends.  I'm very curious, genuinely interested, are there are "arguments" that theists have provided for proof of a God's existence (not even the Christian God), that you found compelling?  Or caused you to pause and perhaps say, there might be A God out there?

No, for the very simple reason that arguments are not evidence. Imagine if you will a trial at which the prosecution argues eloquently but fails to present a single piece of evidence. I'm one of the guys in the juror's box wondering why the judge hasn't thrown this out of court.

I'll admit that I would at least be interested if a theist popped in with something new but it's inevitably the same old tired arguments from cosmology/morality/teleology/blah blah blah regurgitated by some apologist working off theology that was stillborn a thousand years ago. Seriously, I'd probably make a better apologist than most theists.

I found that when it's all broken down in most debates, an agnostic/atheist boils down to moral arguments/judgments against God, which in and of themselves does not disprove there being a God per se.  Just that they refuse to accept a God they find reprehensible.

I think that the gods that some people claim to worship are pretty reprehensible. In most cases I'd gladly add the qualifiers "gormless", "bumbling", "grossly incompetent", "blood-thirsty", "petty"... Well, you get the idea. A lovely example of the worshipper creating god in their own image. If any of these gods existed then the proper course of action would not be to worship it but to cower in terror and the hope that it might overlook you and somehow fail to kill you through sheer ineptitude.

As for god, rather than these nasty caricatures above, well:

(1) I've never met the bloke.
(2) The universe seems to get on well enough without him.
(3) Every god ever imagined has been the result of religion and we know that's just organized superstition. And no, yours isn't ant different except as a study in history, anthropology, or social psychology.

[Carl Hickey]

Okay, let's be honest.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.
Mark Twain

= = =

Power is applied through knowledge (indoctrination), money, "muscle", according to Alvin Toffler (Powershift 1990).

[The Grand Nudger]

Twain offered some of the most consistent and consistently damning appraisals of religion as practiced in all of english lit. That said, he wasn't chiefly opposed to religious principles, rather, he was obsessed with religious hypocrisy. It consumed him. It was public in his works, even more prodigious in his notes...and all of that, was carefully managed, to be less than the full measure of his thoughts because he knew it would be harmful to him as a person and author. All summed up brilliantly in a single quote. If christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a christian. Elaborated upon at length in War Prayer.

A more comprehensive view might suggest that it was precisely because twain was deeply committed to religious principles (as he saw them - and ideologically) that he offered the remarks about their misuse that he so frequently did. One thing he absolutely was not, was an atheist.

[Carl Hickey]

Okay, who lied to me most?

My family (mother, father, ...), "my" religion (a kind of state), "my" state, ... whom I trusted most.

They lied to me in "my" language.

Call it propaganda, indoctrination, earth's gravity, ... whatever. One cannot escape it.

So, one knows that one knows nothing.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's the whole point of effective propaganda. Not to convince you that what they say is true, but to convince you that there is no such thing as truth.

[Pat Mustard]

Some very well respected scientists are believers ....

Are those scientists theists because or in spite of thier scientific findings?  

In spite, as borne out by how they present their scientific findings and how they defend their belief.