Straw man or poor reading comprehension on your part. Again, you completely missed the point. Not all skeptics arrive at the same conclusions.
You didn't have to go and prove James right, but now that you have, ignore is probably the best thing, wouldn't want you to blow a gasket trying to answer simple questions.
It seems you didn't understand what I said to you. Your God created skepticism and skeptics. You're telling me that your God put skeptics into the world specifically so they would fail and go to hell. A God like that is certainly not worthy of any respect. Why would anybody worship such a manipulative, evil God?
As an atheist, I can play Devil's Avocado here. I may not believe in God but I don't think the God model of humans is as illogical as may skeptics think. I think there are better ways to tackle the issue than trying to 'illogic' a way out of God. So: God created humans and gave them free will. He wanted them to have faith in him, because he felt that ineffable belief without evidence would make them better people, as opposed to, say better cynics. Example: having faith in God can translate into having faith in other people - especially those outside our tribe who are, similar to God, inscrutable to us. That would be a big step toward a peaceful loving existence on Earth. Here's a parent-child example. I go out at night to a film and leave my preteen son home under his own recognizance. He gets into the booze and destroys the place. Do I love him and console myself that I gave him that freedom? Or do I punish him because he should have known better? Because I raised him right? He made a conscious choice he knew was wrong. Am I evil or manipulative for setting him up to fail? No. I set him up with an opportunity to succeed. Because I love him. Clearly there is some logic at least in exacting punishment on someone for an action - despite you giving them the freedom to act. That's what's important about humanity: using our free will to make the right decisions, the wise decisions, the moral decisions. Finally: 'evil' is word that simply does not apply to an entity with the status of Creator. He is literally God, and thus he is justice. He is above human perception of justice, since humans perception of justice is predicated in either a] an authority, or b] a body of peers. To the first - yes God is the judge. To the second, God has no peers. 'manipulative' is not a bad word for one who literally manipulated you into existence. Manipulated is a bad word when applied to peers, such as any other human ,who has no innate right to do so. Again: I don't believe in God, but I don't feel it's quite that easy to dismantle him on human moral logic alone. It's a weak argument at best.
DaveC426913 (what do all those numbers mean at the end of your name?): I think you misunderstand what I was trying to do there. I wasn't trying to prove that God doesn't exist. I was working on the assumption that kx000's god does exist, and questioning what the nature of that god is like, based on what kx000 tells me the god does to skeptics - i.e. he creates them, knowing all along that he will send them to hell. In my opinion, any God that would do that is unworthy of our respect. We might worship it out of fear, perhaps, but not because "God is love", which is what kx000 claims. Does this God want people to know him, or does he want to hide himself away? If he wants people to know him, then why rely on something like "faith" - belief in the absence of evidence? How does it make us all better people being either unsure that God is even real (skeptics) or believing that God is real for no good reason (religious people)? That argument threatens to mix together the two different usages of the word "faith" that I have discussed before. If you have "faith" in some other person, you usually mean that you trust them, and that trust is usually based on evidence - e.g. your own history of interactions with them, or the reputation they have that you're aware of, or whatever. If you believe, with no evidence at all, that some other person is trustworthy, say, then that's more akin to the religious kind of faith, being belief without good evidence. By "having faith in other people" you might just mean that your default position is to trust people until they show themselves to be untrustworthy. But that's not really faith. It's just a pro-social attitude you take and it is quite rational. Here's a similar example, for your consideration: A pre-teen boy has no idea who his parents are. They have never been a part of his life. During his childhood, his carers gave him a book and told him it contained all his parents' rules - i.e. the rules that set out how his parents expect him to behave. Rule no. 217 says "When you're at home on your own, don't drink the alcohol and destroy the place." Elsewhere in the rule book, it says "Rule 2001. If you disobey any of the rules in this book, your parents will punish you. The punishment will be life in prison." The book also says things like "Rule 1. Your parents love you" and "Rule 13. It is wrong to disobey your parents' rules." Over time, as he grows up, the boy starts to wonder about the book. He starts to question whether his parents are alive, and whether they really wrote the book at all. He has met people who assure him that, yes, the book was written by his parents. Some of them even claim to have met his parents, themselves, perhaps even receiving private communications from them. On the other hand, he has met other people who tell him the book is a lie: his parents died when he was a baby, and the book contains words of others that are merely attributed to his parents. That he can't verify the writers of the book is one problem. Another is that after reading it many times, talking to other people and educating himself independently, the boy starts to think that maybe some of the rules aren't very good. For instance, Rule no. 31 says "All homosexual people are evil and must be killed by stoning" and Rule no. 87 says "Some people are meant to be slaves. If you want to take and keep slaves, there's no problem with that." One night, when his guardians have gone to a film, the boy drinks the alcohol from the booze cabinet and destroys the house. One year later, there is a knock on the door. The boy opens it. Standing there are a man and a woman, carrying handcuffs, which they slap on the boy. "We are your parents!" they tell him. "We are arresting you for breaking the rules in the Parent Rule Book. You will spend the rest of your life in prison!" The boy is dragged away and lives out the rest of his days in a concrete cell. --- Wasn't that a nice story? Now, let us consider. Suppose that the man and the woman who turned up out of the blue at the end of the story really were the boy's parents. The parents were real all along. The Book of Rules really was written by them, and all the people who had told the boy both the facts about the parents and the book were right all along. While presenting a broadly analogous scenario, here's what you, DaveC, had to say: In light of this, I ask you: Were the parents in my little story evil or manipulative for setting the boy up to fail? Or did they set him up with an opportunity to succeed? Were the parents justified in exacting punishment on the boy for doing something that they gave him the freedom to do? It's not like they didn't warn him what the consequences would be. It's right there in Rule 2001. The boy, having read the book many times, and having been assured it was all genuine, could hardly plead ignorance. And the moral of this story, you tell us, is that what is important in it was that the boy was given the freedom to make the right decisions. It certainly wasn't the parents' fault that he chose to drink and trash the house. They weren't even there at the time. Now the most important question of all: is there anything wrong about any of this? Are the parents at all at fault in my scenario? If so, what did they do that was morally wrong? And how, if at all, can the same reasoning be applied to the God of the bible?
Again, not all skeptics reach the same conclusions. For example, I don't believe in space alien visitations/abductions, ghosts, etc.. And no, God didn't create skeptics/skepticism. It created free will and that's just some of the myriad of things humans do with it. Saying God created skeptics so they would go to hell is like saying God created sin so people would go to hell. Sin is what keeps people from God, not something God created. God does not want separation, but people freely choose it for themselves.
So, that would be "selective" skepticism, where you decide to apply it over here but not other there. It looks like believers can't reach the same conclusions either, but we already knew that. Since they rarely, if ever apply skepticism, their conclusions are all over the map with little, if any logic or reason being applied. But, it's interesting that you say God didn't create skepticism and that's it's the choice of people to use and apply skepticism to the world around them. Yet, you also claim you don't believe in ghosts, for example, which means you yourself have used and applied skepticism, even though it's selective. And most likely, you have probably used and applied skepticism elsewhere in your life and perhaps on many occasions, perhaps even each and every day of your life. Can we further deduce that the one and only area in your life you don't use or apply skepticism is your faith in God? Curious that, isn't it.
I picked this username more than 20 years ago, specifically anticipating the 21st century where virtually every good username gets taken in time. I wanted one single username for all time that I would never have to change. Incidentally: 42=The Answer. 69=Nice. 13=My birthday. I didn't misunderstand that. But what diff does it make, if you are not ultimately going to argue that God is illogical and thus to be regarded with suspicion? By extension the preteen boy in the house alone only abides his parents out of fear, not out of his respect for them because he knows they love him? Does that make sense? Well, perhaps for the same reason the boy's parents don't join him on every afterschool outing with his buds, or on every date with some girl. You don't internalize right and wrong if your tutor is perching on your shoulder. Stretching the analogy thinner, it would be a pretty disempowering experience if the parents texted him every 20 minutes on his date to let him know they were watching his every more. Remember, the point is for him to internalize these morals, so that he doesn't need a peal of thunder in the distance every time he eyes the candy bar in the candy store. I disagree. In my view at least, if I have previous experience (i.e. evidence) with someone enough that I trust them, then it is no longer a matter of faith. When I invoke faith is when I trust a stranger will, say, return my wallet I left in the bathroom an hour ago. No evidence, just faith in the goodness of people generally. I don't presume to speak for this God but I can see how that might be a message that promotes brotherly love. But so what? I'm not imbuing faith with a capital letter, or any ulterior meaning. There is only one kind of faith - small f. Yes. That is a perfectly logical account. And that's part of the paradox, as I see it. Both the path I proposed and the path you proposed are perfectly valid. But one leads to success and one leads to failure. All other things being equal, isn't the one that leads to success a better path? (Wow, I can't believe I'm actually talking about "following the path" in this context.) Well .... sure. I guess that's the point of free will, is that you choose your story. In our examples, one leads to success and happiness and the other leads to failure and punishment. Isn't that a pretty good litmus test? This is where the God-parent analogy breaks down. Parents do not hold the power of life and death over their preteen children, in the eyes of humanity. We believe that boy has inalienable human rights, and therefore there is a criteria by which the parents can be judged right or wrong. Whether or not God is extant, I can accept that, by definition, such a entity - who literally created the universe and everyone in it - can do no wrong. Of course it also means that - as a human who tries to divine this Gods logic at the Pearly Gates - I might feel it is not worthy of respect. But so what? I'm still going to hell.There's no higher court to appeal to. If God exists, he is the final judge on creation and damnation of humans, no matter what we think. Dumber analogy, but: Every block in a pyramid is trapezoid shaped - every one has a flat top to hold another brick. Except the top one. Being the top brick is a fundamentally unique state. Of course, none of this means any of it is true - but it does maintain a certain degree of internal logical consistency.
Skeptics can go to hell as free and happy things, they arent evil and we dont hate them, they're just a tad bit hopeless, and they suffer. The devils necter.
I have decided to start a spin-off thread using the example I put to DaveC, above. It can be found here: The Parable of the Absent Parents Please feel free, DaveC, to copy relevant parts of your latest reply there if you want to.
In context, we're talking about skeptics of the existence of God here. One of which is skepticism. Which means that, ultimately, God created skeptics. God, being omniscient, must have known the myriad things that humans would do with their free will. Among those things would be skepticism and, more generally, "sin". (kx000 says skepticism is a sin, by the way. You might want to argue that out with him.) God allows sin. It's not very compassionate of God to keep people from him simple because they do what he allows them to do, and what he must have known in advance they would do when he allowed it in the first place. You should check out my Parable thread (linked above). I think we have more things to discuss.
kx000: Once again, you didn't address the question I asked you. Maybe if you stopped preaching for a moment you might be able to have a conversation like a regular human being. Just a thought.
God created the skeptics because they make hell a beautiful place, but I dont want to suffer with them so I dont allow them into my nature. In order to help people skeptics require people to get sick and suffer, so theologically the only place for them is helping the people in hell, because in Heaven everyone is perfectly healthy.
