My planet is my cite.
Please provide a description of that god whose nonexistence is a “universal truth”. You seem to be making a claim about the nonexistence of a vast category of entities who may share very few similarities (many of which have been explicitly devised to be unfalsifiable). If you cannot describe something well enough, at the very least, to derive some of its implications, then I suggest that your assuredness in its nonexistence is misplaced.
But I am genuinely willing to entertain the notion that perhaps you know something that I do not. So I humbly request that you tell me why the statement “there are no gods” is true beyond doubt. What do you know that I don’t? And please don’t merely repeat that it is reality and not opinion; that isn’t an argument.
Ignore.
Facts are not true because you state them, but because they are true. Nevertheless, if you assert something as fact, there is a burden on you to prove it, if you expect someone else to accept that it’s factual. You did not do that. You merely reasserted it in a more longwinded, and even more arrogant “It’s true because I say so!” fashion.
Sorry, you haven’t proven a thing.
I think you re wrong here, or are at least guilty of the educated Scotsman fallacy. Many Protestant churches teach that salvation is through faith alone. It is one of the differences between Protestant and Catholics.
Indeed. Although the question of whether lacking faith is a moral failing receives a lot of attention nowadays, that wasn’t always the case — and even now plenty of educated Christians maintain that atheism is sinful. Debates on the subject can be quite lively; see, e.g., this First Things article (and comments), in which the author maintains that atheism is culpable ignorance. In other words:
This isn’t necessarily to say that atheism implies damnation, but if it’s a sin, well, damnation for the unrepentant still seems relatively popular among Christians. Whatever the case, to claim that “more or less all educated Christians” believe that “[a] man who […] honestly does not find the evidence compelling, is not violating his religious duty to worship”, seems … overstating the case a bit. Or a lot.
That’s a rather fine distinction; a Catholic would say that faith leads to good works such that, in the absence of the latter, there was no faith in the first place. Faith is still paramount (and good works without faith wouldn’t help you if lacking faith is a sin).
Or even that Good Works are Faith, in an applied and practical sense.
They may agree that someone who honestly finds the evidence uncompelling isn’t sinning thereby. But they may stipulate that there’s not actually any such thing as honestly finding the evidence uncompelling. If they think it’s self-evident, then they think that one can’t find it uncompelling unless one is being dishonest.