A Summary of Arguments

In response to:

"Religion and the Bible can offer many good things and gives people so much hope"

Feel free to comment, agree with, or refute any of my arguments.

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I'm sure the Bible, theologians, etc have many good things to say about human life, but all of this is riddled with discussion that there is a supreme being who created the universe. There is nothing suggesting that the universe was intelligently designed and there is nothing suggesting a supreme being. If we see no evidence suggesting that these claims are true, we should not believe in there.

Theologians and philosophers have been trying to argue for God's existence for the past 2000 years. All of the arguments have failed; the claims put forth by theists regarding the existence of God are insufficient and false. We can talk about human life, morality, hope, love, etc without God. We're even better off doing so. Why should we bother to believe in God and follow a specific doctrine if ideas if the ideas are false and God does not exist? We're only lying to ourselves and being intellectually dishonest.

Sure, not all religious people behave poorly or are ignorant, but many "lay-people" and ID-proponents/young earth creationists are. My aunt, for example, thinks that I am possessed by the devil and am going to Hell. I've met people who "don't believe" in medicine, and people who think that if religion went away that everyone would murder each other.

If we like the Bible, fine, we can glean information from it, but this does not require us to believe in God or that any of the events actually happened. I can, for example, watch Star Wars and enjoy the idea of "the force" and not believe that it actually exists. I can also read Sufi literature and not believe in any of their supernatural claims.

I suppose we can both agree that many people are simply intellectually lazy. Many religious people don't even read the Bible or know much about their religion. Most have not researched the arguments against God's existence. Most have not even analyzed the arguments for God's existence. A great percentage of religious people don't believe in evolution by natural selection....

I think a huge problem is lack of education and I firmly believe that religion is a barrier to this. Many religious people are content with religion and don't pursue answers through philosophy, science, or elsewhere. In order to be a Christian you have to believe that Heaven sat and watched for about 70,000 years while humans died of birth defects, malnutrition, teeth growing in, etc and God finally decided to intervene in the Middle East to a group of barbaric people who could not read and write and were goat herders...not in China or Egypt where people were very literate and much more intelligent (no offense to Middle-Easterners, of course).

I can't find any truth to the metaphysical claims of religion...the more and more I study, listen to claims of theists, and even talk to theologians, I find nothing. I even spoke with the theologian who attended the Moreau Lectures and the best response he could give for the existence of God was that since God is a metaphysical claim, so there is no evidence. Of any person, theologians and apologists should be able to give arguments for the existence of God since that is what they primarily study and devote most of their time to.

Christianity, though, makes very specific claims about the universe including but not limited to virgin births, resurrection, miracles, power of prayer, etc. There is no evidence for any of these claims and no miracles have happened in the past few centuries while we now have the power and technology to document. The miracles of the Bible have no evidence and do not persist.

If the claims of religion are false, does not Christianity fall flat on its face?

Hundreds of other religions make very specific claims about the universe, make their own prophets and gods, have their own holy books, and you and many others certainly dismiss all of them except for one. Why easily dismiss so many other gods and religions and say that the claims of Christianity are true?