Vorkosigan

Can we make this thread title more seemly?

spin

There is no "good argument for atheism", as there is no good argument for theism. It always comes down to belief. Functionally, agnosticism does the same thing as atheism, in that you live a godless life, but lacks the belief centred notion about deity. By definition gods are beyond our experiential equipment and we cannot devise verification of the existence or non-existence of deity, so WGAFA?


spin

(Who gives...)

Plognark

Actually, what he did to Job was pretty wretched too. Among numerous other things.

Toto

What would you suggest?

I was ready to move the OP, but the responses raised the tone a bit.

John A. Broussard

If there are no good arguments one way or another for a belief, then we human beings have a lot of grief in store for us. If I believe fire burns, then I'm in a better position to survive than someone who doesn't share that belief.

Sheshbazzar

"Loaded question", have you stopped beating your wife? Insufficient poll options, or correct ones not listed.

spin

Non sequitur. You are playing with the word "belief", using it differently. You have the objective means of verifying what you are calling a belief here above. That is not the case in one's musings about a deity.


spin

John A. Broussard

You are absolutely correct. Beliefs about a deity fall in the class of those which cannot be verified.

I did confuse the issue. We should always be clear that there are some beliefs such as a belief in pink unicorns that cannot be verified. A belief in zebras can be.

Thanks.

WWFStern

I'm curious to know...

Why were you ready to move my original post?

Toto

BCH aims at a scholarly or at least semi-scholarly discussion of Biblical literature and history. Putting an expletive in your title is not a good start. Whipping up emotional reactions is not something we really want to encourage, even where those emotions are justifiable.

And you will notice that we don't have a lot of polls in this forum. We don't base things on popularity contests.

But other than that, the thread fits in here perfectly. It's just the title that is grating.

From the perspective of the people who wrote the Exodus story, YHWH was not your wimpy modern therapeutic helper-type god. YHWH was the god of warfare and natural disasters, not to be judged by human moral standards.