Super quote wall attack!Also, if i can't trust my senses, i can't trust anything and might as well just shoot myself. Except if i can't trust my senses i can't be sure that i actually just shot myself.
You can't trust your senses, just look at optical illusions. After that, can you trust your interpretations of your senses?
Optical illusions are pathetic. Touch them, familiarise yourself with them, or even just notice the inconsistencies within many of them and they are easily defeated. A more resilient example would be fraud. Someone walks up to you, asks for directions to the nearest, say, hospital. Tells you about the friend they are visiting, and walks away in the direction you suggested. Your senses, and mind, tell you that they were lost and looking for help, but the truth is that they were keeping you still and distracted while their co-worker picked your pocket. The truth is that your senses are actually, in almost all cases, accurate, and almost all illusions play upon the various levels of interpretation that the sensory data is processed by.
So what can we do to determine truth? And why would we?
I suggest that truth is important because humans desire things that will be retarded in the absence of truth. You don't want your money stolen, so you want to know whether someone is being honest with you.
As to finding the truth, all we can do is take the most reliable information we have and make assumptions based upon it, then logically extrapolate the appropriate response to a situation. You want to avoid thieves? Well some thieves use distractions, so if you are distracted, consider reassessing your security...
That's no reason to shoot yourself, beliefs like that aren't worth dieing for.
What do you have against death? Death is great! You get to stay up as late as you want, you get into all the cool parties, and there is an unlimited supply of free chocolate!
@Areyar: Bring on those pitchforks! 
Here comes the rant!
Omnipotence and randomness are not mutually exclusive. An omnipotent being could in one moment imagine an entire universe
I find this the most accurate way of portraying the typical all-powerful monotheistic deity. As its imagination we exist solely to serve its whims, it does not care for us, it does not value us, it does not respect us, such things are completely inappropriate. Your imagination serves to entertain you, it gives you a chance to review a scenario beyond the constraints of your existence, and you care only for what you can explore by using it.
Imagination exists purely as a result of its creator, it doesn't matter what you choose to do, if you decide to adopt an orphan, then that is because you were imagined deciding that, and if you also choose to burn an orphanage to the ground, then that also is not something that you have any power to oppose. If you were truly to believe that, then the only benefit you could derive from your choices would be to evidence that you are a product of an entity you can be proud of, and that means that all products of it must be as virtuous as you are, or else they serve to defeat your hopes. In such a scenario the slightest betrayal condemns your beliefs, your actions must be pure, your thoughts must be pure, your neighbours must be pure, your planet must be pure, all things that exist must be pure or else it will prove that the only entity that matters, the only evidence of our existence, the only value we have, does not match your hopes, and the whole of everything will have ended unsatisfactorily...
Is everything predestined then? In a way, yes, but only if you have the "outside view". Which we don't, so for all practical purposes, the universe is not predestined and you do have free will.
If we ignore a god's implications than it is obvious to ignore its existence also.
I just said, 4 times, that all-powerful or omnipotence has multiple interpretations/definitions
It does no, there is only one definition of absolute power, all deviation is a failing in the human capacity to comprehend the failure of logic. If an all-powerful entity maintains that something is impossible for an all-powerful entity while simultaneously enacting that impossibility then it is not in conflict, existence enters into conflict to make allow its actions. There is however, plenty of room to debate the specific aspects of a specific entity. It is no surprise that people might throw around concepts beyond their ken to artificially aggrandise their subject. But even a truly limitless being can be logically refuted effectively. We can observe its evidence and quantify its nature, and that is enough to prove if the existence of a creator is more or less probable than the absence of one.
When did time start? It didn't
Why does this existence exist? It just does.
These are perfectly sound, logical, and probable answers to the needs that a creator attempts to, and quite resoundingly fails, to fulfil.
If you then try to apply a human concept, or if you really BELIEVE in it, a universal concept such as logic on it, you'll still fail, because even universal means: limited to this universe. Which God ain't.
Imagine the following scenario: There is a human, if the human does not eat it will die. There is food, the human can eat it. There is a road, from the human's perspective, cars appear upon it randomly, and they travel at random speeds, though their may be patterns or distributions limiting that randomness, if the human coincides with a car then the human will die. The human cannot eat the food without coinciding with the road. The human dying from the above causes is not satisfactory.
Do you agree that the above scenario is plausible?
If yes, then can you depict a satisfactory scenario that you feel is plausible without using logic?
If no, then if humans rely upon logic, and a god does not conform to logic, is it, logic or no, appropriate for those humans to accept that god?
reliable evidence
There you go, the hole in the wall. You have none at all. Unless you define it to be. Where your definition is nothing more or less than someone elses definition that there must be a God. So you're back at square 1. Do not pass Go.
Quite the contrary, I have a great deal of reliable evidence, if a tennis-ball forcefully strikes a wall I expect it to bounce. I Have seen this happen every time, if something has not bounced than either it was not a tennis-ball, its subject was not a wall, or it did not forcefully strike it. The evidence is reliable because it produces a consistent result, it never betrays me, never! It is also reliable because it is apparently not lying, there are always alternatives, but at its core there are some very consistent theories about tension and pressure and the distribution of energy that all converge on the scenario that tennis-balls are bouncy!
So it is that what we have is lots and lots of reliable evidence, an entire world of it, in fact, THE entire world of it. The creator gave us a world that forces us to rely upon evidence, and then denies us any reliable evidence of its own existence. It has forced a situation in which the only way that a human will believe in it it if that human is voluntarily or otherwise ignorant. I for one do not wish to be accepted based solely upon my faculties of ignorance.
As for the other assumptions: 1. Doesn't need to be. Buddha was merely wise.
1. Buddha is according to some, not a god.
2. Buddha is, at least in some stories, extremely powerful, more powerful, ironically, than the gods...
3. Wisdom IS power, even just withholding it or granting it can have great influence upon humans...
3. No, it's not. Worship is not prevalent amongst all religions. A lot, but not most, and it certainly isn't the basis for the value of a religion.
If worship is not desired, then why would it be a good idea to
1. Impose your worship upon a god that doesn't want it.
2. Have a religion to something that doesn't worship anything.
or 3. Whatever other scenario involves participation in a religion to a being that doesn't care about that religion.
Grrrrrr, to be fair, I must admit that my original statement "Worshipping god is important." is flawed, a more fitting version would be 'participation in the religion is important.'
In general: Often logic is produced to "prove" that an omnipotent God is impossible. But if you are omnipotent, you could wipe any of your thousand arses with logic at any time. So there 
But humans can't, and humans are more important to the question of theism than any possible gods are.
In Christianity, there is suffering on Earth as a test to see if people are worthy of going to Heaven. {}
The obvious answer to this, of course, is "but if God is omnipotent and controls and knows everything, he already knows if you will go to Heaven or not".
The obvious answer is far from that. The christian god is a creator, that is its single most definite feature. And ironically, it is also the obvious rebuttal to that statement. If a creator actually wants worthy humans then that creator could just create them worthy to begin with. A truly powerful creator could create a thing to possess an effective simulation of a history, it could create it with wear and tear, it could create whatever it requires. If there were anything that even suggests that there might be some answer to this then there may be some reason for people to worship. But as it stands, there is a pretty good reason for humans to find the modern christian god to be worthy of opposing, even in the absence of hope, because even failed resistance is better than being bound to such a monster. Even if its only crime is to deny us the ability to know its benevolence...
Author
Topic: Atheists (Read 410259 times)