When debating someone who believes in the fundamental components of the Christian narrative, i.e. the choice by man to eat the apple, the fall, original sin, and the subsequent return to God, I choose to focus not on the specifics but rather on the first and most important events. These are the creation of man, and man’s choice to eat of the tree of knowledge.

1. Why did God create man? Why does an omnipotent and omniscient being create us in the first place? Did he want companionship? Was he bored? Was he curious as to the limits of his own powers? None of these explanations fit with an all-knowing and all-powerful being. Something there has to be missing in order to desire to create such a lowly and fragile life form in the first place.

2. Why create man with a desire for anything other than God? Quite simply, if the purpose of man is to love God, then why not create him just to do that, and with no desire to do something else?

3. Even worse than creating man to desire something else (step 2), why create an perfect source of that which he desires (the tree of knowledge) and then create a third actor (Lucifer) to taunt him into making the wrong choice? Is this not the very definition of “set up for failure”?

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die. — Genesis 2:17

The Free Will Gambit

Seeing that this is horribly illogical, all Christians are trained to fall back on the specious argument of free will. The idea is that despite the fact that God put everything in place for man to fail, he also gave man free will. So he had the option to choose correctly, and he should therefore have made the right choice.

This is absurd.

Let’s try another, scaled-down version of this experiment that will prove how silly this concept really is. Sit a two-year-old in a high chair with candy on one side of their tray and spinach on the other side, and stand back with an open hand.

If the baby reaches for the candy, slap the hell out of it.

Ah, but that’s not fair because…..why? Because babies are programmed by evolution to prefer sweet tastes, so it’s unfair to ask them to choose the right one because it’s not as pleasurable?

Ok, here’s a better question: who determines what tastes good and what doesn’t?

Right, God does. And who determined how attractive the tree of knowledge was to man in the garden? Right, God did. And who decides how attractive “loving God instead”, i.e. “spinach” was to man at that very moment in the garden? Right again–God.

So if God controls all the variables, where’s the free will?

Desires > Free Will: The Well Scenario

Free will is subservient to the strength of natural desires. If I just spent three days in a well, with no food or water, when I get rescued I have the choice to a) drink water and eat food, or b) go ride a bike. Are those equal choices for your supposedly “free” will?

Or how about you have the same well scenario, but this time you have two options when you get out: a) consume food and water, or b) go help the homeless at your local shelter. Oh, you’d choose food and water? Selfish. You had the option–help others or indulge your own dark desires. You chose wrong.

It’s the same in the garden. Here’s what God essentially offered:

You can either a) stay with your creator in love an harmony forever, or you can go with Satan and Eve to Earth, where you’ll learn about a billion interesting and naughty things (which I programmed you to find attractive). Oh, but if you choose the one that I designed you to find irresistible (and that I hired Satan to seduce you towards), I’ll punish you…

It’s the choice at the well all over again. God determines the strength of every single one of your desires. Is it your “choice”, as a man, to find platinum blonde women attractive? Is it your “choice” to like the taste of steak or beer?

Or, even better, assuming you’re a heterosexual male, could you decide to be gay right now? Could you exercise your free will and simply choose to like men instead of women? No, not really. So how much of a choice is it, really, when you’re asked whether you want to have sex with an attractive woman or an attractive man? Where is your free will when the directions and strengths of your desires are determined for you?

So I ask again: if God controlled all of the following in the garden…

• The attractiveness of staying with God
• The attractiveness of the tree of knowledge
• The seductiveness of Lucifer
• The gullibility of Eve
• How likely Adam would be to do what Eve had already done

…and we all agree that God did control these things…how did man really make a choice at all?

Simple answer: he didn’t.

Lucky for us the story isn’t true at all. It’s nothing more than one of thousands of these highly similar narratives created by man throughout history. 99% of the world accepts that 99% of the other nearly identical stories are completely untrue, so it’s only a matter of time before we clear up that last 1%.:

Links

[ Fiction Based on Fiction | dmiessler.com ]
[ Free Will: The Necessary Delusion | dmiessler.com ]

Within the context of this thread I’ve been having a conversation with a friend about whether atheism and agnosticism is a belief. First off, let’s synchronize.

If one were to claim that nowhere, anywhere in the universe, is there anything that could be construed as a god, that would be a belief. So, yes, I would agree that that form of strong atheism is a belief.

What most atheists and agnostics believe, however, is that we don’t know what happened before the big bang, and that we become atheists only when faced with specific claims by those who do believe.

So with that in mind, here’s my latest response in this ongoing discussion on whether or not my contention that Christianity is NOT true is equal to someone’s contention that it is true. I include it here because I think I succeeded in capturing the argument better than my previous attempts.

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First, I didn’t say anything about there being no external influence. But it’s a leap to give that influence a sentience, a personality, and talk about what it thinks and wants and loves and hates, and what it did when.

…all based on a book written by men, just like a million other books written by men about other such Gods that you don’t believe in.

Second, if someone doesn’t have enough information about what happened pre big bang, which nobody does, and refuses to come to any conclusions about it, that’s not strange behavior. It’s logical and humble.

I’m saying I don’t have any idea what caused the big bang, and you’re calling that crazy. I say it’s 1000 times as crazy to sit on a speck of dust in a vast universe and tell me that you KNOW not only who created the universe, but also what they think, what they like, don’t like, etc.

Think about it for a second. Seriously.

So again, my stance is that your answer is not correct, and your answer is ASTOUNDINGLY SPECIFIC and personalized.

So if someone says I believe that there is a person in Guam right now standing on a couch, touching their nose, holding a newspaper, wearing a yellow shirt, with their shoes untied, who served in Vietnam, and got married on a Friday…

If I tell you that I don’t believe that, then do I have a BELIEF? No. A belief, in this context, is an active thing. It’s something you branch out on based on evidence, personal or otherwise. YOU are the one branching out here, not me. I’m simply NOT believing in your claim about this person in Guam.

It is YOUR responsibility to show EVERYONE ELSE why YOU believe this person is standing on a couch in Guam doing all these things. Why? Because it’s both HIGHLY SPECIFIC and UNLIKELY.

So don’t call me a non-couch-stander-believer-person. It makes no sense. Using that system I’m also a non-frogs-flier-believer and a non-moon-cheese-believer. But we don’t assign ourselves those labels because that would be silly. And assigning a label to someone who doesn’t believe in ONE SPECIFIC GOD out of all the thousands that have been created over time is just as silly.

And please don’t come with, “But mine is SPECIAL!” Of course yours is special (wink wink). Do you think that’s a unique response? Everyone thinks THEIR god is the right one. Except for atheists and agnostics. We don’t think ours is right because we’re not pretentious enough to claim we have that kind of information.

Here he is ignoring a man in a wheelchair and essentially admitting he’d have him arrested for inhaling a common plant when it’s his only way to get relief.

Romney just very clearly showed us what kind of man he is, and I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think Jesus would approve…

A new friend and I had an extraordinarily productive and meaningful discussion about religion last night. This is noteworthy because he is a devout Mormon while I am an atheist. What impressed me most was the fact that everything was handled from the foundation of science and logic (he’s a PhD candidate in Computer Science).

The debate was civil and moved briskly in a productive direction; we literally agreed on just about everything. When we reached the appropriate point I openly asked him why he believed in Mormonism when he openly acknowledged how illogical it all was from a scientific point of view. He gave me this answer, which I find to be excellent.

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My belief in God is not based on willful delusion, but on empirical (i.e. experiential) evidence. In fact, my acceptance of the religious principles I adhere to are logically built on this evidence. The issue is what you are willing to accept as valid evidence. As a trained scientific researcher (in the field of information systems), I have strong respect for the scientific method and consider it to be the best means available have for acquiring knowledge. In using the scientific method, scientists make epistemological decisions to only accept as evidence those predictions of phenomena that are measurable, testable, objective, reproducible, and so on. However, not all phenomena are measurable, etc. However, the fact that a certain phenomenon cannot be assessed using the scientific method does not mean that it isn’t real. It simply means it is beyond the scope of what science can validate. To claim otherwise would be an obvious fallacy. Many human experiences fall into this category. Most personal experiences are not objective or testable. In my case, my acceptance of the existence of God is based on several instances in my life in which I have experienced or “felt” a communication from God. None of these experiences are verifiable using the scientific method, yet they were as real as anything else I have experienced in my life. Simply put, I have made a decision to accept these experiences as evidence of the existence of God. In other words, I have broadened my epistemological criteria to accept as valid these profound and highly individualistic experiences. The willingness to accept spiritual experiences as evidence is a great divider of theists and atheists. Knowledge gained through spiritual experiences is obviously not scientific, but millions if not billions of people have accepted such knowledge as the basis for their belief. Such acceptance is not unfounded or thoughtless, but rests on experiences that these people consider very real.

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So in other words, he agrees, as a scientist, that evidence is the only thing we can trust. All he has done is expand his own personal criteria for evidence to include the spiritual experiences that he has had. This doesn’t solve anything tangible, but at least it advances the debate to the realm of discussing those experiences and whether or not they should be included.

Most importantly, we’re speaking logically — Mormon to atheist — which I think is refreshing.

So how should this discussion proceed? What’s the next step?

Conservative Christians in the U.S. have a serious bit of cognitive dissonance on their hands when it comes to the Jews. On one side they support them emphatically because they are supposedly God’s chosen people.

Yet at the same time they’re compelled to believe every single one of them is going to hell because they don’t accept Jesus. That’s a difficult pair of beliefs to have to maintain simultaneously.:

A note from a pleasant Christian on Reddit…

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p>I was going to say his comments were not very Jesus-like, but that is a discussion in and of itself.

 

In the beginning there was nothing — just God. Before the book of Genesis there were no humans and therefore no human suffering. In fact there was no suffering whatsoever since God Himself was the only thing in existence, and He is perfect.

So in a pristine world completely devoid of pain God decided to create a life form. He created a flawed Adam and Eve, as well as the serpent/Angel who took advantage of those flaws. In short, He created every single actor on the stage, complete with strengths and weaknesses, all with the benefit of complete omniscience and flawless execution. In other words, every single one of our flaws and weaknesses was given to us on purpose.

Why did God create an entire race of people that He knew for absolute certain would suffer horribly? Due to the benefit of omniscience there was no question. God knew exactly what Eve and Adam would choose. How could He not know given the fact that he designed each person in flawless detail?

So in the beginning there was no suffering. Now, in God’s world, there is unspeakable suffering. The argument that God was offering an eternity of happiness is not a defense simply because we didn’t exist at all in the first place. It would have been immoral to create us with even one iota of chance that we would suffer, but for God it was a guarantee!

From God’s perspective there is no choice on our part; there is only certainty. Free will doesn’t apply because God knew what choice we’d make before he even set things into motion. There was no choice because he controlled all the variables (our weaknesses and the temptations) AND knew the outcome.

So man did not commit the original sin. All we did was play along precisely as God already knew we would. The true original sin was creating us in the first place and putting us into a situation where we had no option but to suffer.:

I normally don’t invite people to explore books that promote atrocities such as slavery, but in this case there’s a specific reason to make an exception.

[ Link: A Good Book That Promotes Slavery ]

[ Moved to: How I Became an Atheist Continued ]

[ Continued from: How I Became An Atheist ]