I think you got me wrong there.
God is not a banana, but like a banana he is a conception of man.
Except God refers to something that does not physically exist, which makes it slightly different, and more open to interpretation.
That is all God is essentially - openness to interpretation - with a sublime connotation.
The word god is like the word great, in many ways. At least the word ‘divine’ is. And this is really the form of god-hood that we can understand and apply most concretely.
The idea that God created the universe means that man needed to interpret his existence. That God is great means that man had interpreted his existence as being rooted in greatness.
These are all stories made up by men, and the stories are really stories about the men that made them up.
Ridicule other posters? I merely quoted their exact words, it’s you who found them ridiculous. James S Saint there ridiculed atheists in his post and you laughingly agreed with him, and that’s ok, have all the laughs you want, but don’t call me childish when I do the same and have some laughs at good old James. His absurd statement in my sig isn’t even related to theism anyway.
I think you meant to say liar and I am very suspicious of everything you say since you blatantly stated that you care more about the results of a belief than how true it is, aka that you’re willing to lie to get your way.
You demonstrate your ignorance when you interpret evolution your own way, thereby making a strawman instead of trying to figure out what it actually teaches.
Willingness to lie and erect strawmen and then knock them down is an indication of close mindedness.
I don’t throw around accusations unless I can back them up.
I think everyone that believes in God is ignorant regarding their belief in God, doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily wrong about everything else.
I think you’re wrong in lying to others and trying to lie to yourself. Pretty sure you can build an altruistic, loving system of values that is based on reality, no need to lie.
What about people like Bertrand Russel then? At the age of 89 he was jailed because he was protesting against nuclear weaponry. Do you think he did it because he was an atheist? Or perhaps because he was a good person?
My point being that there are good theists and good atheists, just like there are bad theists and bad atheists. Since theists were and still are more numerous you will find much more good theists, but you will also find much more bad theists, which you overlooked due to your selective thinking.
I just think that a person’s position about the existence of God has little to nothing to do with how moral the person is.
Is that not a categorical error? As far as I know, ideas exist only within the mind, not outside it.
If I have the idea that I have a trainticket in my pocket, it is a categorical error that I decide to look into my pocket for a trainticket?
I think it is if you look for an idea of a trainticket in your pocket.
There are no minds in existence?
The idea affects the mind. The mind affects the body. The body affects its environment. The environment is “physical reality”. Hence, the idea affects physical reality.
If an idea affects physical reality, it is a physical existence (can be sensed/detected).
Can’t you detect when someone has a certain idea?
How could that be if the idea had no physical means to affect your senses or didn’t exist?
… and something exists where ever it has affect, to the degree it has affect.
Gosh, Atheris, I thought I wasn’t gonna talk to you anymore, since you were getting ad hominem-ic … Ok, this is the last one, 'cos I’ll be gone again for a while (my job involves a few trips a month) and I also need to go back to other forums I’ve been neglecting.
I understand some casual banter here and there would be just fine, that’s not what I meant as childish. To me, one’s signatures are for something to show one’s philosophical stance, something that should reflect one’s mindset. As I said, I’m not angry that you use them for ridiculing theists or others, it just looks childish and in poor taste, well, to me. That’s why I was skeptical if you’re mature enough to carry an intelligent conversation. I’ve seen people in other forums who are only there to mock or belittle others, and I never had a good experience with them, and your signatures made me think you may be one of those people. I just pointed that out honestly, so you may realize how some people may judge you by your signatures. (I don’t know, maybe it’s just me!)
You keep pounding on me that I said I may not follow the truth if it produces a bad outcome, calling me a liar (thanks for the spell check 
). I’m wondering if you’re then surely gonna follow the truth as you say …
If the atheistic view of why we’re here is correct (that we’re here to propagate our DNA), then why is it morally wrong for a man to have affairs with multiple women and have as many children as possible? Well, if you are rich enough to pay for all the necessary child support, you actually should have as many affairs as you can, promiscuity should be encouraged according to the atheistic view, no? If you’re worried that your wife or girlfriend would kill you, then as long as you have a way to make sure that you don’t get caught, or you make sure they are too afraid of you to do anything about it, then, it’s fine, right?
Also, if your spouse ever gets ill or injured and deemed incapable of procreating, what’s wrong with leaving him/her? I guess there are people who’d do that, but most people look unfavorably on those who do, and favorably on those who don’t. Why?
If you follow the truth according to the atheistic view, you should leave your spouse, and find someone else who’s capable of having your children, no? If you were married, is that what you’re gonna do, divorce your wife (providing that I’m assuming your gender and sexual orientation correctly 
), if you find out she can’t conceive? … Follow the truth of what we’re here for?
Yeah, so blue banana exist too, just because I can imagine them.
Does that prove a blue banana invented love?
Try again.
Where does it prove god is responsible for love?
Can you detect when someone has a WRONG idea?
… and hence we have blue bananas controlling the universe.
Sometimes. Can’t you?
As an example:
True, there is no blue banana except in my mind. And duh, that is the whole fucking point.
Another example of wrong thinking:
This wrong for example the same reason you brain dead moron.
I really think you need to stand back for a moment.
In your search for god you seem to have lost the ability to do basic processing of text.
You used to be a bit of a challenge, but now you are too easy.
The elephant trap I just set you is about as wide aa a chasm and you fell into it.
Maybe you need to take a break, on sit in church for a while until you see the reality of what you are supporting.
And another example: such sentences so profoundly indicate the lack of ideas of an exceedingly bad philosopher.
Even the lack of ideas and ability to think has physical affect.
Yes, they do, you are in fact a VERY bad philosopher. I was accurate in my assessment, I did not expect you to agree so readily.
So are you going to take that much needed break?
James S Saint according to you, any conceivable idea also exists in reality.
If you really want to get technical about it, ideas exist in physical reality in form of neurological connections in the brain. But if you have an idea of a car in your brain it doesn’t mean you have a car in your brain but an IDEA of it (OBVIOUSLY).
It is the IDEA of a God that influences human actions which affect reality, not God itself.
Exactly - even blue bananas.
Yuujin how do any of those actions follow from an atheistic worldview? Are you saying that if you didn’t believe in God you wouldn’t have any reason to behave morally? Cause if so, I daresay you’re a bad person. I try not to do immoral things because they hurt other people, cause them physical or mental pain. Ever heard of empathy? It isn’t that far from love.
Also, it’s fun how you say those things when according to theistic worldview you described in my Problem of Evil thread you’d be justified doing any of the things you condemned here.
One of the leading figures in atheism Richard Dawkins says this;
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. . . . We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. That is exactly what we are here for.”
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says:
Hypotheses non fingo, quicquid enim ex phaenomenis non deducitur hypothesis, vocanda est, et hypothesis vel metaphysicae, vel physicae, vel qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicae, in philosophia locum non habent.
To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers: we merely know their effects; we are in a estate of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things; but the pride of philo- sophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena, which are the objects of our attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the oc- cult qualities of the peripatetics to the effuvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulae of Herschel. God is represented as in- finite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him: they exclaim with the French poet,
Pour dire ce qu’il est, il faut etre lui-meme.
Lord Bacon says that atheism leaves to man reason, philo- sophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men: hence atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear- sighted, since he sees nothing beyond the boundaries of the present life. — Bacon’s Moral Essays.
1The first theology of man made him first fear and adore the elements themselves, the gross and material objects of nature; he next paid homage to the agents controlling the elements, lower genies, heroes or men gifted with great qualities. By force of reflection he sought to simplify things by submitting all nature to a single agent, spirit, or universal soul, which, gave movement to nature and all its branches. Mounting from cause to cause, mortal man has ended by seeing nothing; and it is in
1.Beginning here, and to the paragraph ending with Systeme de la Nature," Shelley wrote in French. A free translation has been substituted.
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this obscurity that he has placed his God; it is in this darksome abyss that his uneasy imagination has always labored to fabric- ate chimeras, which will continue to afflict him until his know- ledge of nature chases these phantoms which he has always so adored.
If we wish to explain our ideas of the Divinity we shall be ob- liged to admit that, by the word God, man has never been able to designate but the most hidden, the most distant and the most unknown cause of the effects which he saw; he has made use of his word only when the play of natural and known causes ceased to be visible to him; as soon as he lost the thread of these causes, or when his mind could no longer fol- low the chain, he cut the difficulty and ended his researches by calling God the last of the causes, that is to say, that which is beyond all causes that he knew; thus he but assigned a vague denomination to an unknown cause, at which his laziness or the limits of his knowledge forced him to stop. Every time we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was able to operate by the aid of forces or causes that we know in nature. It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignor- ance, attributes to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has always re- spected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.
If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. In proportion as man taught himself, his strength and his resources augmented with his knowledge; science, the arts, industry, furnished him assist- ance; experience reassured him or procured for him means of resistance to the efforts of many causes which ceased to alarm as soon as they became understood. In a word, his terrors dis- sipated in the same proportion as his mind became en- lightened. The educated man ceases to be superstitious.
It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence,
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submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees? That is because, in primit- ive times, their legislators and their guides made it their duty. “Adore and believe,” they said, “the gods whom you cannot un- derstand; have confidence in our profound wisdom; we know more than you about Divinity.” But why should I come to you? It is because God willed it thus; it is because God will punish you if you dare resist. But this God, is not he, then, the thing in question? However, man has always traveled in this vicious circle; his slothful mind has always made him find it easier to accept the judgment of others. All religious nations are foun- ded solely on authority; all the religions of the world forbid ex- amination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in God; this God is himself founded only on the au- thority of a few men who pretend to know him, and to come in his name and announce him on earth. A God made by man un- doubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
Should it not, then, be for the priests, the inspired, the meta- physicians that should be reserved the conviction of the exist- ence of a God, which they, nevertheless, say is so necessary for all mankind? But Can you find any harmony in the theological opinions of the different inspired ones or thinkers scattered over the earth? They themselves, who make a profession of ad- oring the same God, are they in Agreement? Are they content with the proofs that their colleagues bring of his existence? Do they subscribe unanimously to the ideas they present on nature, on his conduct, on the manner of understanding his pretended oracles? Is there a country on earth where the sci- ence of God is really perfect? Has this science anywhere taken the consistency and uniformity that we the see the science of man assume, even in the most futile crafts, the most despised trades. These words mind immateriality, creation, predestina- tion and grace; this mass of subtle distinctions with which theology to everywhere filled; these so ingenious inventions, imagined by thinkers who have succeeded one another for so many centuries, have only, alas! confused things all the more, and never has man’s most necessary science, up to this time acquired the slightest fixity. For thousands of years the lazy
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dreamers have perpetually relieved one another to meditate on the Divinity, to divine his secret will, to invent the proper hypo- thesis to develop this important enigma. Their slight success has not discouraged the theological vanity: one always speaks of God: one has his throat cut for God: and this sublime being still remains the most unknown and the most discussed.
Man would have been too happy, if, limiting himself to the visible objects which interested him, he had employed, to per- fect his real sciences, his laws, his morals, his education, one- half the efforts he has put into his researches on the Divinity. He would have been still wiser and still more fortunate if he had been satisfied to let his jobless guides quarrel among themselves, sounding depths capable of rendering them dizzy, without himself mixing in their senseless disputes. But it is the essence of ignorance to attach importance to that which it does not understand. Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interest- ing. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interests of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced by the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take of- fense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.
If, leaving for a moment the annoying idea that theology gives of a capricious God, whose partial and despotic decrees decide the fate of mankind, we wish to fix our eyes only on the pretended goodness, which all men, even trembling before this God, agree is ascribing to him, if we allow him the purpose that is lent him of having worked only for his own glory, of exacting the homage of intelligent beings; of seeking only in his works the well-being of mankind; how reconcile these views and these dispositions with the ignorance truly invincible in which this God, so glorious and so good, leaves the majority of man- kind in regard to God himself? If God wishes to be known, cherished, thanked, why does he not show himself under his fa- vorable features to all these intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and adored? Why not manifest himself to the whole earth in an unequivocal manner, much more capable of convincing us than these private revelations which seem to accuse the Divinity of an annoying partiality for some of his
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creatures? The all-powerful, should he not heave more convin- cing means by which to show man than these ridiculous meta- morphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested by writers so little in agreement among themselves? In place of so many miracles, invented to prove the divine mission of so many legislators revered by the different people of the world, the Sovereign of these spirits, could he not convince the hu- man mind in an instant of the things he wished to make known to it? Instead of hanging the sun in the vault of the firmament, instead of scattering stars without order, and the constella- tions which fill space, would it not have been more in conform- ity with the views of a God so jealous of his glory and so well- intentioned for mankind, to write, in a manner not subject to dispute, his name, his attributes, his permanent wishes in inef- faceable characters, equally understandable to all the inhabit- ants of the earth? No one would then be able to doubt the ex- istence of God, of his clear will, of his visible intentions. Under the eyes of this so terrible God no one would have the audacity to violate his commands, no mortal would dare risk attracting his anger: finally, no man would have the effrontery to impose on his name or to interpret his will according to his own fancy.
In fact, even while admitting the existence of the theological God, and the reality of his so discordant attributes which they impute to him, one can conclude nothing to authorize the con- duct or the cult which one is prescribed to render him. Theology is truly the sieve of the Danaides. By dint of contra- dictory qualities and hazarded assertions it has, that is to say, so handicapped its God that it has made it impossible for him to act. If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has, filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him?
By P B Shelly