Does God Exist?

This is good question.
Actually the problem is not that the church disposes with some money. The real problem is what they are doing with this money and who is controlling them.
These are public funds, raised by emptying the pockets (literally) of the people ... and should be spent on activities in public benefit.
Investing this money in the SUV of the high priest of the temple could hardly be viewed as any public benefit.
Wasting the money from donations on people that are not working and not willing to work, not educating and not willing to educate, people that have no chance of ever becoming educated or finding some job, without perspectives to contribute with something to the public welfare in the future ... is not exactly activities in public benefit.
Distributing the donations (money, computers, audio and video equipment, foods, etc.) at the church board ... in benefit of the members present and their relatives ... and mistresses, is not public benefit.
The church is collecting this money promising better life to the people that make the donations. Why does it not fullfill its promises ... by using the donations according to the will of the grantor, for example?
If the church promises to us a better planet (by preaching its special theories of relativity ... and eternal life in Heaven & Hell), why does it not start dosing something on the issue ... to make a definition of a better planet, for example?

Once again, wild and unsupported statements like alphabet soup with no meat.

To imply the human race had no intelligence, conscience or commerce before Jesus is like saying the universe is 6000 years old.

Greed still exists today and is mostly found in the church and those who attend it... The teahadists, the most religious of the republican party, are the most inhospitable... Was it no Jesus who said:

Mark 10:23 KJV
And Jesus looked round about , and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!

Comment: If we all lived like Jesus today we would all still be in sackcloth and sandals... Your contradictions Spendi usurp what little reason you have.

It was 20th century labor unions that improved the middle class not Christianity... Middle class poverty persisted for thousands of years after Jesus, in fact, pagan roman soldiers lived quite wealthy lives compared to their holy roman counterparts...

It was the French revolution, science and reason that threw off the shackles of the church's aristocracy and its usury...

The remnants of the christian church embodies all that is still wrong with society today...

I did not imply that the human race had no intelligence before the Christian era. They had pony express and oil lamps. The rich I mean. The movers and shakers at the cutting edge. Not chaps of your stamp Rex.

There was obviously commerce. Camel trains for example although some of them probably got lost in the wastes and were never seen again. Taking inflation into account it would have been about $5,000 to shift a bottle of beer 500 miles. And looting was a good proportion of it.

I'll allow a small amount of conscience but it wasn't a lot and it didn't take much to stretch what there was to breaking point. Compare what the Romans did to Carthage compared to what the Allies did to Germany after 1945.

There's meat there and there's plenty more in the records.



How do you define "wrong". Hasn't every system got something wrong with it? What would a system be like that had nothing wrong with it? Your remark has no point unless you define the term its pejorative effect depends upon. It's a cheap shot aimed at the witless.

And "remnants" is rather at odds with holding the Church responsible for what is "still wrong with society today". Are you absolving the non-remnants (I can't think of a better word), from any responsibility.

You emotions are too much engaged I'm afraid.

On behalf of the members of A2K I thank you for the respect you have for our intelligence.

Jesus Christ Files Lawsuit Against GOP For Slander
http://www.freewoodpost.com/2013/06/01/jesus-christ-files-lawsuit-against-gop-for-slander/

There is nothing "wrong" with evolution. How can there be when the theory of evolution is couched in terms that there being nothing wrong with it is the only conclusion logic insists upon.

Evolution must be a perfect system and it follows, it seems to me, that interference with it might present risks. Of causing imperfections due to the law of unintended consequences and thus causing something to be wrong with it.

Like sitting watching the ball game with a six pack of John Smith's Extra Smooth (Silk in a Glass). Each. Perfect evolution could never have created such a wonderful thing. Nor a Stratocaster.

It takes High Mass in a cathedral with a symphony orchestra, a choir of angels, wafting incense, stained glass windows and dreamy vaulting, reaching up to infinity, where the light and the sound gradually disappear in fading echoes. Pink Floyd attempted it.

Twenty odd pubs within a few minutes taxi range with wannabee bimbos perched on bar stools, in like manner to the female of the bird of paradise, flashing their thighs and crossing and recrossing their shapely and cream-smooth legs like a metronome, etc, is not a manifestation perfected evolution could have produced in my humble opinion.

The Venus of Willendorf depicts the human female of 25,000 years ago and there seems no reason to think she wasn't typical of the specimens of the previous 2 million years. The world began 6000 years ago because the scribes couldn't face drafting genealogies for one more ******* day. All that mattered was that the begatting was the main theme.

The Pharaohs capped their structures and others put a closed dome over them. The rest platted leaves as best they could.

This cannot be sure.
Where did you get this information from ... and the evidences to claim this?
1. The parallel reality & the parallel universe do not exist or are unknowable & inachievable to us. There is no way for you to know what might have happened if ... whatever hadn't happened in the past
2. The economy works much better when the money is distributed more evenly among the market agents.
For example: let's have 10 people & 10 BN dollars
Case 1: Man 1 has 9.99991 BN ... and all the remaining 9 have by 10 000 each.
Man 1 can do virtually everything: go to restaurants (with his mistress ... on the other side of the planet), sail on yachts, drive SUVs & private jets, he has the power to live at the edge of chaos & to destroy the planet if he decides ... but he is only 1 superconsumer (... & 1 mistress eventually). The other 9 people are living at the edge of mysery ... & on photosynthesis. As customers to the restaurant & the yacht business they are virtually zero. We have here 1 destroyer & 9 zeros.
Case 2: All ten have approximately by 1 BN dollars each. All ten can hit it on bacchanalia: go to restaurants (with their mistresses), sail on yachts, fly on jet planes - the market has 10 superconsumers & 10 mistresses ... that will drive the economy. Besides that all the ten have 10 times less destructive power in comparison to Man 1 of Case 1.
So which of the two cases will be:
- better for the economy to grow
- better for the human species to survive longer
- better for the planet (to be destroyed more slowly)
- better to maximise the quality of life of as many people as possible
... and which of the two cases is closer to the teachings of the Christian religion?

Although God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he suspended those powers when he created this "testing ground" called Earth by giving us freewill so that he could take notes to see how we do.
For example as a test he ordered Abraham to kill his young son but at the last instant said "Stop! Put down the knife, for now I know you would have obeyed me".
See, he obviously DIDN'T KNOW before the test what Abraham would do.
(I can quote the relevant verses if you like if we're allowed to at A2K)

RexRed said- "Last night I heard the best argument supplanting the idea that God does not exist..."

On the other hand, doesn't the existence of the universe and everything in it prove that someone or something must have created it? Call it "circumstantial evidence"..
Looked at another way, is it more logical to say somebody created the universe or that it just decided to create itself?

No, Romeo, not at all. To the contrary I suppose it not to have been created, that it was always around in one form or another

There's a distinct possibility. We can postulate that the state of nothingness will eventually be shown as contradictory where can further suppose between sequential productions a moment of nothingness but of zero duration

...

Is that the time of the Lone Ranger?

Why would one assume that the universe had been "created?" That seems to me to show a distinct lack of imagination, undoubtedly from a puerile anthropocentrism.

"God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What else have we to work with?

And Rousseau was hoiked off the stage with a shepard's crook a long while ago for boring everybody into a stupor.

As a denial of being puerile and anthropocentric is defeats itself by internal logic. Setanta should get a PR expert in.

Setanta said- "Why would one assume that the universe had been "created?" That seems to me to show a distinct lack of imagination, undoubtedly from a puerile anthropocentrism"
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Aargh if there are 3 things I'm scared of it's big words, the police, and women..
As for the universe, we don't know what "reality" is so we can only speculate.
Even astronomer the late Sir Patrick Moore once said on TV that he gets letters asking him to explain the universe and why it exists, and he simply replied "Does it?".

It makes sense. Without a definition for 'existence' it is pointless to discuss who created what ... if and why, etc.

So you're arguing against your own creationist position? Well, that's a kind of progress.

I am still struggling over trying to come up with a definition for God...

So we need to define existence before we define the so called "creator"? Is that maybe putting the cart before the horse?

Do we define Henry Ford first before using a derivative of his automobile?

Do we need to define electricity before we flick on a light switch?

Not sure what I am saying here someone help me out.

What comes first, defining the chicken or defining the egg, or is this argument just a hyperbole used for evasive rhetoric?

Yea that seems a critical issue, Rex

My reaction too

I suspect the problem is unresolved semantical issue

It's all in the language.

It all depends on the perspective...

From God's perspective Abraham was beguiled by a barbaric and superstitious ritual, from the human perspective, Abraham was proving his loyalty to God...

Not a testing ground.
Jehovah was assure of Abraham's faith before Isaac as he was of Job's faith before Satan's challenge.
Just as he was certain that many humans would be faithful even after the Edenic rebellion. He is a God not of a plan, but of a purpose.