Pat Kelly

Someone once told me it would be presumptuous of anyone to assume there is no god without being able to prove it. My response was if we already know why people once believed the world was flat, why should anyone waste time trying to disprove a false premise whose source of misinformation is already know. We can fully account for where all the gods came from in the first place leaving us with nothing to disprove. Human psychology and our imagination's ability to create things to fulfill our needs, along with a fairly clear historical trail, shows religion itself is a product of the human mind. Trying to disprove the existence of gods would be like trying to disprove anything else coming from the human imagination. In short, there is no real reason to try and disprove something we already have explanations about where it came from.

One day, long long ago and literally thousands of years before any of the gods associated with today's religions had entered human consciousness, someone out there first dreamed up the idea of gods. The idea caught on and served to answer many unanswerable questions while also serving to fulfill a wealth of other human needs. The sexist nature of religion and many other elements that can be found in scripture mirror human nature and irrationalism instead of something supposedly coming from an all knowing creator. Today's scriptures are edited versions of yesterday's scriptures with the part about the earth being at the center of the universe edited out among many others. The true authors of scriptures are fairly obvious and the fingerprints of human imagination as well as the state of human knowledge at the time written, are all over the pages.

Over thousands of years, some the brightest minds humanity could produce added to and embellished the scriptures until you have the various great literary works we now associate with each of today's religions. It seems one of the motivations behind the creation of scripture was an attempt provide humanity with a set of rules that would enable us to live together without doing too much harm to one another. This was a valid quest by some rather smart people but associating humanity’s desire to create utopia with supernatural beings was probably not the best way to do it.

The fact many different religions with totally different stories and gods to go along with those stories evolved in isolation from one another is fairly good proof of religion's true sources. To logically believe in any one religion today one must disbelieve all the others and see them as false superstitions. If one stops to answer the question of where all these other false religions came from, it takes a leap of faith not to rationally conclude the particular religion you learned to believe in does not come from the exact same source.

Scientifically we are now reaching a point where we do not need imaginary gods to account for life, creation or the universe. As conditioned as the human mind is to beginnings and ends, there is no real reason for us to assume what is, has not always existed without a beginning. The fact of change does not have any real relevance to beginnings or ends or necessitate a creator associated with a beginning that likely never occurred. The fact our existence is temporary does not rule out our desire to somehow live forever.


:notworthy

Jinto

<deleted by self>

Thought I'd save the mods some time.

Nowhere357

So it would not be presumptuous of anyone to assume there is no Christian Biblical Creator god of myth. Is this the only definition of god?

This is false. Buddhism for example demands no such thing.

Also, you've equated religion with superstition. Religion may contain superstition, but you haven't shown that religion is ONLY superstition.

Again, you have provided justification for the assumption there is no xian creator god of myth, and other creator gods too I guess.

You have not provided justification for the assumption there are no gods.

But I agree that reality does not imply a creator.

Just_An_Atheist

Given that there a great deal of god(s) that have been hypothesized throughout history, it would seem initially very improbable that any particular god exists given the great many possibilities. It would seem, then, that atheism might be the default position regarding all gods, since each god is a particular god.

Nowhere357

I agree with this. I disagree that individual personal gods are the only interpretation of the word "god", and I disagree that the refutation of the xian myth is adequate to make it non- presumptuous of anyone to assume there is no god.

Goober

It's presumptous to assume that there is a god without evidence. The natural assumption is that something does not exist until evidence arises that it does. That's why we don't assume gnomes, purple unicorns, invisible monkeys, etc exist because no one has proved they don't.