Comment by Artor on September 4, 2011 at 5:09pm

I'd like to correct something for you. God won't die, because God, as we know, isn't alive. It will fade away into appropriate obscurity, a relic of dusty reference libraries or the future.

Comment by atheistrising on September 4, 2011 at 5:53pm

The religious books are filled with lies a lot of believers flatly deny evidence and keep believing in god

Comment by Garrett Taffer on September 4, 2011 at 8:39pm

I'd like to think Stephen Hawking is God, and he's just testing us. When we are done, he'll swoosh us away to Universe #2, completely depending on how smart we are about all this.

 

As much as I'd like to think that religion has been stumped, and that the numbers being controlled now by an ancient book is dwindling, we won't see a great shift in thinking anytime soon. At least we skeptics are coming out in greater numbers than ever before...

Comment by webtuto on September 4, 2011 at 11:16pm

these things dousnt prove that god dousnt exists , but i dont think our universe would be this organized withouth a super power
can you explain that please

Comment by Albert Bakker on September 5, 2011 at 1:27am

Actually it's very hard to come up with a disorganized Universe. You just put in a few parameters in a computer model and out pops some sort of Universe with some sort of organizational structure. But besides that, you can't conclude from your ignorance about structure formation that it therefore should be the work of a "super power." Your particular "super power" presumably.

A hiatus in your understanding is a hiatus in your understanding, as in you don't know. It can be an invitation to explore. Please do.

Comment by Helen Pluckrose on September 5, 2011 at 8:47am

You may be interested in the German Idea from the 19th century if you have not already discovered this? David Friedrich Strauss wrote a book called 'The life of Jesus' which took apart the new testament and showed how, if a god was to be invented, it would be exactly like Jesus using the Jewish culture of the time and the direction in which reform of Judaism was going - it was very convincing. Feuerbach was a philosopher at the same time and he said 'God did not create man but man created God' and he demonstrated how the Christian god has changed with society - as certain ideas became outdated, God's personality changed - he went from being a stern authoritarian figure to a benevolent father at the same time as the concept of the father changed in this way in 19th century England. George Eliot translated both of these works and the German Idea had a big Impact on Europe. It did not reach America at that time and I have often thought that it is the influence of the atheistic French Revolution, The German idea  and the industrial revolution which made Europe move away from Puritanism and become so secular America, not having any of these because there was the War of Independence and then civil war going on, retained the puritan feel influence in their Christianity?

Comment by Lindsay on September 5, 2011 at 12:10pm

Thanks for your comments, I enjoyed reading them. I don't think we have ever disproved God and I don't think we could ever prove or disprove God, but then there are lots of things we can't prove or disprove like the existence of unicorns, goblins etc. I think being atheist allows us to carry on making discoveries and opening our minds to learning new things, which in my view is better than attributing the world and our universe to a higher being. If we all just concluded that it was God who created everything it stops us wanting to discover other possibilites. If science did ever prove the existence of Gods and had reasonable evidence to back it up then of course I would no longer be an atheist.

 

I like how Helen Buckrose talks about how people's perception of God has changed with society. I think we can all agree that most Christians from civilised societies don't believe it's OK to punish people by making them eat their own children, but they see their God as all loving and caring. I will have to give Strauss, Feuerbach and Eliot a read (I have a lot of reading to do, on top of my nursing studies).

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