Well, if you’re offering… 
I’ve got some questions ready - like a proof that P=NP, or a counterexample. Basically, tell me something I don’t know and no one else does either. A cure for AIDS would be cool, but probably not so simple. Carl Sagan noted that those who claimed to have talked to aliens from UFOs never asked for any verifiable evidence. Well, not since Adamski, who said the aliens told him Venus was a paradise.
Oh, please. You can’t prove that, and neither can I.
Just to be clear about this, are you asserting that it can’t be proven that the Bible contains errors?
No. In fact, I’m pretty sure it does (at least, in its current form). After all, it was written by men, who can and do make mistakes.
Here’s a simple enough answer for you.
An all-knowing god would know exactly what it would take for me to believe that he exists. The fact that he doesn’t come up with this evidence tells me one of two things:
- He is an pathetic asshole, or
- He doesn’t exist.
Try to be honest with me. If your child was playing with something that you knew to be extremely dangerous, would you pass along vague hints to assorted third parties in hopes that someone figures out the clues in time to save your child, or would you rush over to your child personally, take your child out of harms way, and tell her, in language you know she will understand so that she will get the point, what the danger was so that she could avoid it in the future.
Instead, we have nothing to go on except vague feelings, and half a million messengers with half a million different messages. It’s as if someone started a game of “telephone” over five thousand years ago, and the one that started it has no interest whatsoever in finishing this ghodforsaken game by just letting us know what the original “word” was. If I was chosen to start a game of “telephone” at a party, let it go on for even three hours, then refused to let anyone know what the original word or sentence was, do you think people would stand around in amazement, declare it an “unknowable mystery”, and bow at my feet?
I don’t think so.
What makes you think the evidence isn’t there already, just waiting for you to find it?
Then how can it be relied upon as containing any truthful information at all anymore?
There are things the Bible claims were done by God which never occurred, so either the God described by the Bible does not exist or the Bible doesn’t tell the truth about him.
Possibly the last half of the above statement is the correct one. Perhaps knowingly dishonest or accidently mistaken, but they were just men who wrote. Chosen by God or not is irrelevant.
Why?
First of all: a number of religions have several creation stories with different presentations of “what happened”. Inside the same religion. (And in some of those, if you ask an adherent which one is true, you’ll get a “What do you mean, which one?”) A myth is a story attempting to illustrate a truth, generally in allegorical or figurative terms. Describing the same set of events in a number of different ways serves to illustrate different parts or components of what’s being talked about; anyone who uses figurative language is liable to be familiar with an intricate complex of representations of the same concept. (Love is a red, red rose. Love is fire. Love is a river. Love is a battlefield. The image defines the angle of approach to the thing, not the thing itself; couching a truth in imagery shapes the ways the truth is viewed in the moment, often for purposes of looking at a particular part of it.) (A book I’ve had recommended to me, but have not yet acquired and read, is Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths? by Paul Veyne. It seems mildly relevant to mention.)
Second of all: if one truly apprehends gods as tribal or regional, then there is no reason for their stories about where they and their people came from to be consistent with each other. These are the stories of that region, not some part of global consciousness. Most myth systems center the universe on their part of the world or conception thereof – and when people are locality-centered, this is very easy to slot into a worldview. There is Here, and there is All The Rest Of It, Whatever – even in a world with near-instantaneous communication and rapid travel, we have this; the ancients certainly more so.
Also, people depend on their context; their understandings of the world vary accordingly (or are limited accordingly – see Jesus on the subject of why Hashem-through-Moses permitted divorce). Some image-structures that work well in one place will simply fall flat in other circumstances; successful communication would require being able to choose lines of reasoning and imagery that function for the one addressed rather than presuming a universality. Even if there is some universal godhead, it would be most effective in presenting itself to humanity in ways that are tuned to the circumstances of the specific peoples it was trying to contact.
I honestly don’t know if it can. I think first of all that the bible has been unknowingly mistranslated, so that many things which we can read in it are fairly different from the original meaning the author intended. I still read the book occasionally, but I definitely don’t consider it the inerrant word of God as some (mostly fundamentalists) people do .
Such as?
This doesn’t get you out of the hole. It’s God’s responsibility to show us the evidence directly. Hiding it or expecting us to “discover” it somehow in the natural world is not good enough. It has to be delivered in a way for which their is no doubt.
Plus, Czarcasm said that God should know what evidence would convince him personally. God should know that evidence which cannot be immediately known by him is not sufficient.
Ket me be straight about this. ALL of the moral obligation is on God to prove he exists. Humans do not have the slightest obligation to make any attempt whatever to find God.
Not necessarily. There’s a lot of presumptiveness here (not just in this specific post) that we know best, that for God to prove himself he would have to ask “how high?” if we told him to jump.
“I think that God should tell us what’s going on. He hasn’t, therefore there is no God” is NOT a valid argument. Who are you to say what God should and shouldn’t do?
Why would you follow such a capricious being, in that case? Would you accept that from a boss? From a loved one? From a friend? "Oh, there are certain things you’re supposed to do, but I’m not going to be clear on what, or when, or especially why, but watch out if you don’t ‘read my mind’ properly because, you know, there’ll be hell to pay.’
I’m an inoffensive atheist. I honestly don’t care if you feel that god makes your life better. Just leave me alone about it, politically and societally. The current state of the US and its administration, and apparently a majority of voting citizens tends to NOT let me be about god and religion, however. Your beliefs are no more valid than my non-belief, so why should I be asked to march to the beat of your drum?
The translations aren’t a problem. We can still read them in the original languages. There is still all kinds of redaction and layering and copy errors but we can more or less read the canonical forms in their language of authorship.
Stuff the Bible says that God did which never occurred:
[ul][li]The world was not created in 6 days.[/li][li]The earth was not created before the sun and the stars.[/li][li]All animals were not created separately and simultaneously.[/li][li]There was no Adam and Eve, no talking snake and no forbidden fruit.[/li][li]There was no worldwide flood.[/li][li]There was no enslavement of the Israelites in Israel, and accordingly, there was no Moses, no Exodus, no plagues, no parting of the red sea, no wandering in the wilderness, no mannah from Heaven, no Commandments on a mountain, no God as a pillar of fire and no magical Ark of the covenant.[/li][li]There was no conquest of Canaan. God did not destroy the walls of Jericho. Jericho did not have walls and was uninhabited when the Bible says this happened.[/ul][/li]
I’ve been confining myself just to stuff that God was supposed to have done but the historical inaccuracies run to the supposed achievements by human characters as well. There are probably hundreds of historical errors in the Bible and it would take to long to list them all. The above is just a small sample.
I Am Man-the greatest creator and destroyer this world will ever know. I have crawled out of the prehistoric muck and built homes, businesses, towns, cities, countries and whole civilizations. I hold power enough to either destroy this world or leave it to explore the stars, and none of this was given to me by some ghost. When I speak, it is clear and concise. When I act, it is obvious. When I care about something, you will know it.
My question to the “gods”-Who the hell are you?
I don’t agree with you 100%, but I think we’re on to something. I agree that humans don’t necessarily have an obligation to find God. Lee Strobel and Peter Kreeft, discussing this, said that God gives just enough evidence that those who seek will find Him.
I feel compelled to point out that I believe it says nothing of when. Such a person might find God near the end of his life. It may take an entire lifetime for him to discover God. Some people, who spend their entire life searching for God, may not find Him. I’m not sure how that works, and I plead ignorance - after all, if God exists, he’s a greater being than we are, and again we run into the problem of incomprehension, which some people see as a good reason to throw things back in your face, so I’m going to shut up.
It’s the ONLY valid argument. If God wants people to believe in him it’s vcompletely on him to show himself. If he doesn’t want to show himself he can piss off.
What is this “Who are you to say” stuff, by the way? Who do I have to be? I am the ultimate authority on what I require to believe in gods.
But if you and I go out to Barnes and Noble and buy a bible, we aren’t going to find the original language version. We’re going to find some versions in English, which have been translated several times and probably contain errors in translation.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Stuff the Bible says that God did which never occurred:
[ul][li]The world was not created in 6 days.[/li][li]The earth was not created before the sun and the stars.[/li][li]All animals were not created separately and simultaneously.[/li][li]There was no Adam and Eve, no talking snake and no forbidden fruit.[/li][li]There was no worldwide flood.[/li][li]There was no enslavement of the Israelites in Israel, and accordingly, there was no Moses, no Exodus, no plagues, no parting of the red sea, no wandering in the wilderness, no mannah from Heaven, no Commandments on a mountain, no God as a pillar of fire and no magical Ark of the covenant.[/li][li]There was no conquest of Canaan. God did not destroy the walls of Jericho. Jericho did not have walls and was uninhabited when the Bible says this happened.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
First of all, how do you know those things didn’t happen? Secondly, a lot of people think some books of the bible (for example, Genesis) were supposed to be allegorical.
Again, I’m not passing an opinion on the veracity of the bible. It’s easy to plead ignorance when so much contradictory evidence is presented. 
Strobel is a hack Christian apologist whose “Case For…” books are eviscerated for sport amnong learned non-theists. I’ve never heard of Peter Kreeft but he’s wrong just like Strobel if he says there’s any evidence at all for God. He and Strobel can say all they want that God leaves “just enough evidencre” but it’s still bullshit because there isn’t a shred of evidence and their say-so doesn’t make it exist. Let them show us the “evidence” instead of just pleading for us to take it on faith.
And why can’t God just show himself and end all the mystery. As it stands, he seems to think that we are simply supposed to guess which religious paradigm is true without giving us any good reason to choose one over another. It’s a morally unacceptable way to run a universe and if God is not morally good then God is not God.